The night before Dr. King was assassinated, he stood in the pulpit at the Mason Temple in Memphis, TN, talking to two thousand people, insisting that striking sanitation workers be treated with dignity.
In one of his final sentences, he said, “Let us move on in these powerful days — these days of challenges to make America what it ought to be.”
I think about his words a lot. The challenge to make America what it ought to be.
And I think about what the Founding Fathers wrote: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
America has never lived up to that promise — not for Dr. King, not for people of color, or women, LGBTQ folks, or many other marginalized communities. But it ought to, and that’s our challenge.
We ought to live in an America where every single solitary person, when given half a chance, no matter where they’re from, can accomplish anything if they work at it. An America where nothing is beyond their capacity. But we don’t.
We live in an America where our president — the divider in chief — singles out, scapegoats, and demonizes anyone different in creed or color or conviction.
An America where the president makes a moral equivalence between those who spread hate and those who oppose it, saying there are “very fine people on both sides.”
We have to challenge these forces of hate, and stand up and simply say what the vast majority of Americans agree to : this is not our America, and this is not who we are.
We have to remind ourselves every day, especially in this election, to remember who we are, what we stand for, and what we believe.
And even more so, we have to remind ourselves that there’s nothing guaranteed about our democracy. We have to fight for it. We have to defend it. We have to earn it.
That’s the challenge Dr. King gave us — to fight for what America ought to be. It was just 56 years ago when he told us about his dream, one where Americans would finally rise up and fulfill the meaning of our creed.
Some days it feels like we’re letting that dream slip, but I’m still more optimistic than ever that Dr. King’s dream is within our reach.
Even while we’re in a battle for the soul of our nation, we’ve never had a future that’s more promising. And it’s time for us all to roll up our sleeves and show the world what we stand for.
We choose hope over fear, truth over lies, and, yes, unity over division.
Dr. King’s work isn’t finished, and it’s on us to continue his fight. I believe these are powerful days, and we can’t give up hope.
I know there’s nothing we can’t do if we do it together. And we won’t rest until justice truly rings out for all.
“The core values of this nation, our standing in the world, our very democracy, everything that has made America — America — is at stake.” Joe Biden
Very good white-washed understanding of King.
If you are committed to King’s vision and work, Biden is not your choice this year.
African Americans live Dr. King’s vision every day AND they strongly support Joe Biden’s fight to restore the soul of America.
Enough African Americans stayed home in MI, WI, and PA in 2016 to put Donald Trump in office. They allegedly supported our 2016 nominee as well — too many just couldn’t be bothered to vote.
There is no excuse for any African American to not vote for ANY of the Democratic candidates. Donald Trump is far worse than any of them.
Any voter of any race, ethnic group, culture, or religion who didn’t learn their lesson in 2016 isn’t worth bothering with if they do the same in 2020.
Many of them stayed home because they were denied their right to vote or were never door-knocked or driven to the polls like they were in elections Democrats have won in those states. I blame both Bernie Sanders and Hillary critics for exaggerating her record on criminal justice, I blame Hillary and her campaign for wasting resources in the southwestern suburbs rather then GOTV in the majority black midwestern cities, and I blame Republicans most of all for turning the party of Lincoln into the party of Dixie.
I can sympathize with their not voting if their votes were suppressed, but I have no patience whatsoever for not voting because somebody didn’t hold their hand.
AMEN to this.
I absolutely and categorically reject the premise that any minority voter should require door-knocking in order to vote for HRC over Donald Trump. Certainly seniors and infirm voters should be offered rides — I’m not sure they weren’t and I’m not sure there were that many of them.
Turning swing voters in southwestern suburbs is NOT wasting resources in comparison to GOTV in urban minority neighborhoods.
The latter should not require such handholding.
King always played the long game. He was also called a sellout and worse in his day. King was willing to make crucial compromises for white allies in the Civil Rights movement, but there were bridges too far. “Letters from a Birmingham Jail” and “Beyond Vietnam” show his harshest criticism was directed toward those allies when they fell short. MLK could protest LBJ on Vietnam and the Freedom Delegates while recognizing that backing him to beat Barry Goldwater was an act of survival and not an act of betrayal.
He was also trying to change the soul of America. His “Beyond Vietnam” is less of a political speech and more of a fire and brimstone accounting for all of the sins America committed against poor people and people of color by sending them off as cannon fodder to kill other poor people of color abroad.
None of our candidates come close to King’s vision of what our country ought to be, but all would have his vote against Donald Trump. A latter day George Wallace rip-off even Barry Goldwater would have opposed.
“First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action;” who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.” —Martin Luther King
I know this is an inconvenient truth but AA voters do not believe that Joe Biden is ‘moderate’ when it comes to advancing their march toward freedom and justice.
I think you’re reading something into the poll numbers.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/01/23/joe-biden-black-voters-support-south-carolina-102365
I’m not reading anything into poll numbers other than to state the obvious truth that AA voters overwhelmingly support Joe Biden to be the next POTUS.
Facts are stubborn things. Deal with it.
Overwhelming support of older AA voters. Double digits behind Sanders among voters under 35.
I remember similar “overwhelming” numbers in 2016. What happened with AA turnout in that general election?
The only problem with young voters is ….THEY DON’T VOTE!
1. They came out in 2008 for a compelling candidate with a great message.
2. The youth voting block is much larger now than ever before.
They certainly won’t come out for candidates not gathering their support in the primary. Older folks, on the other hand, they’re more reliable. And they’ll vote blue no matter who. Not sure why we’d risk the youth vote this year of all years. Seems foolish.
The young people had better vote this year of all years. First, Trump will be on the ballot and second it’s their civic duty, darn it! I have no interest in holding anyone’s entitled hand. They are as free as the rest of us to vote in the primaries and make their choice, but they better not sulk. The rest of us should vote for the candidate WE want to see as the next President, not the one we think others might like. If we all do that then our nominee will by definition be the person capable of getting the most votes.
I think this attitude could look very very foolish in November. We’ve tried the threats time and time again, and how have they worked out?
in 2016, 88,000 black voters stayed home in WI. Trump won the state by less than that amount.
Surveys of those who stayed home showed 33% were “unhappy w the choice of candidate,” 8.8% were “not interested,” and 6.6% said their vote “would not have mattered.”
We can go with a candidate who shows all the signs of repeating that apathy. Or not.
@ We can go with …:
We can also look the other way and ignore the pleas when Trumpist storm troopers resume killing black kids in their neighborhoods.
I’m weary of being chastised for my “white privilege” while tens of thousands of able-bodied black men and women choose to stay home because they are “unhappy w the choice of candidate”.
Not a threat, just reality, and the people we’re talking about have more to lose than some of the rest of us.
And there is a good chance that boomer voters will saddle them with a candidate they don’t like.
So it comes down to ageism then?
Let me try and summarize your compliant: You find it unfair that older voters who are in the majority and who for decades reliably turn out to vote are likely to have more influence than kids who are in a minority and don’t vote most of the time.
I guess that really IS unfair. What’s next, jumping up and down and stomping on the floor?
Ok, boomer.
Well, if the boomers turn out in the primary more than the millennials then them’s the breaks. I understand the millennial generation to be larger than the boomer generation so the former certainly could outvote the latter in theory. This is really simple. If there is a candidate who excites the millennials then that generation should overwhelm the primaries with votes for that candidate who will in turn have an excellent shot at being the nominee. Of course, we’re discussing these generations as if they are monoliths which is not reality either. In other elections I understand that “vote blue no matter who” may not be enough, but c’mon – a tyrant will be on the red side of the ballot this year!
In the election of 1800, Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr tied in the electoral college because their party forgot to tell one of their electors to throw away his vote for Burr whom they intended to come in second and thus VP with Jefferson at the top. The House had to break the tie and many Federalists preferred Burr and it went to multiple ballots. Then Federalist guru Alexander Hamilton stepped in. His ideological differences with Jefferson could hardly be overstated, but Hamilton saw Burr as a self-aggrandizing tyrant wannabe and potential traitor. Hamilton thus persuaded his Federalist allies in the House to switch their votes to Jefferson, of whom they were hardly fans to say the least either and break the deadlock. We must follow Hamilton’s example this year!
You can keep saying this or you can listen to what a large group of people are telling you right now. If you choose not to listen, don’t complain in November.
If the tyrant and his party remain in office after November because a large group of people can’t bring themselves to vote for a sufficiently pure Democrat, then they deserve whatever happens next.
Sadly, the consequences of that childish selfishness will fall on all of us.
If the tyrant and his party remain in office after November because a large group of people can’t bring themselves to vote for a candidate who will motivate a larger voting bloc, then they deserve whatever happens next.
Works both ways.
But, right now we have good evidence to avoid a likely problem in November. I think the ones most happy to Vote Blue No Matter Who should consider those potential consequences. But, hey, why not repeat 2004 and 2016 again?
@Works both ways:
I’m confused about your claim.
I’m not sure how “the ones most happy to Vote Blue No Matter Who” can cause a repeat of 2004 and 2016.
I don’t see how the 2004 campaign has any relevance to this discussion at all. As terrible as he was (and he was terrible), the incumbent in 2004 was not comparable to Mr. Trump, and the GOP of 2004 was not comparable to the GOP of 2016 or 2020.
The GOP of 2004 had not spent 8 years in an explicitly personal and racist attack against our first black president. The GOP of 2004 had not refused to even consider the routine Supreme Court nomination of a highly-qualified candidate. There was no wide-scale cyber attack from any foreign power, and so far as we know there were not millions of dollars of illegal Russian cash flowing into the various campaigns of the 2004 GOP national candidates.
The Democrats lost in 2004, like most opposition parties lose most campaigns against presidential incumbents, because enough voters were happy enough with the status quo to ignore the opposition candidate.
A sitting president has to either be VERY unpopular or VERY CORRUPT to not win re-election. It has happened VERY infrequently — Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H. Bush since FDR died in 1945.
The most important way to remove the tyrant and his party from power in November is to SHOW UP and vote for whomever runs against said tyrant and party.
Had any of the voting blocks in question done that in 2016, then the tyrant and his party would not be in power.
Moderate candidates who don’t inspire turnout lose. We lose when those candidates win the primary. Like in 2004 (the most important issue was the Iraq war and we nominated a war supporter) and 2016.
Again, please look at the facts. People are telling you NOW that they may not show up in November and your response is “but they have to or it is their fault!”
Why don’t the people refusing to listen now bear any responsibility?
Had we had a candidate that inspired them to come out then Trump would not be President.
We can have a candidate that energizes constituencies like Obama or we can have a male counterpart of Hillary Clinton. We have evidence on what happened in those elections.
You can say “But Trump is worse!” until you are blue in the face. It’s not enough for many people, and they are saying so, plainly, right now.
I’m only responsible for whom I vote for and don’t like being told I should not pick my choice because how others will feel about it. Those same others who are threatening to sulk in November should also vote in the primary and help us pick the nominee.
The inspiration is Trump – case closed!
How about each of us just votes for the person we want to see as President? Whomever gets the most votes will likely be our nominee and that candidate will have proven s/he is the candidate who can get the most votes. QED
Sure. That would be great.
When people say that they are voting for someone primarily because they are likely to win, they are not choosing who they most want to see as President.
That’s the whole point of this conversation. If electability and beating Trump is your main concern, then the argument is increasingly better for Sanders than any other candidate based on polling of all kinds.
For me electability is just the icing on the cake. I won’t speak for others, but I for one am voting for Biden primarily because he is the most experienced and IMO will make the best President of the field.
This is a great quote, and well worth remembering.
In our rush to canonize MLK — a rush driven in no small part by white moderates — we conveniently forget this side of Mr. King — the side that rightly caused enormous polarization while he was alive.
It might be interesting to speculate about which of the current candidates Mr. King would support were he still alive.
In that context, it is also well worth remembering that MLK was a man of his era when it came to women and women’s rights. Like most of the men of his time — regardless of race, party, religion, and position on some left-to-right political scale — MLK would have a very difficult time supporting any of today’s female candidates.
But speaking to wealthy donors in New York, Biden appeared to suggest that his plan would not involve big tax hikes on the rich.
“I mean, we may not want to demonize anybody who has made money,” he said. “The truth of the matter is, you all, you all know, you all know in your gut what has to be done. We can disagree in the margins but the truth of the matter is it’s all within our wheelhouse and nobody has to be punished. No one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change.”
Biden went on to say that the rich should not be blamed for income inequality, pleading to the donors, “I need you very badly.”
reported in Salon June 19, 2019 by Igor Derysh
Biden is correct that nothing will fundamentally change for the very rich. They will still have more money than they know what to do with even we enact, say, Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax. He’s basically telling the rich there’s actually nothing to be THAT afraid of and of course he is right.
It’s the part where Mr. Biden says “the rich should not be blamed for income inequality” that I find so off-putting. It is very wrong on multiple levels:
– Wealth inequality is a FAR more serious issue than income inequality. Mr. Biden, like so many others, uses the terms interchangeably when they are fundamentally different. Wealth is to income as location is to speed.
– “No one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change”: Something more than HALF of America’s households are one paycheck away from poverty. THAT will and must change. That awful reality is the most direct and immediate consequence of WEALTH concentration. Joe Biden steadfastly refuses to admit that its even a problem. In fact, he won’t even TALK ABOUT wealth inequality.
– It is technically true that the wealthy should not be blamed for wealth inequality, but that’s sophistry that amounts to deceit. Wealth inequality is a result of wealth concentrating in the top 0.001% of the wealth distribution (and the top 0.01%, the top 0.1%, the top 1%, and so on). Whether or not anybody is “blamed”, the unimaginable fortune held by each of America’s wealthiest households MUST be taxed in order to solve this problem.
Regardless of who is at fault, the wealth concentration issue can only be solved by taking SOME wealth away from the top of the wealth distribution and spreading it across the bottom of the wealth distribution. The fact that a 2-3% wealth tax on our wealthiest households will solve an ENORMOUS number of our most pressing economic issues is a measure of just how insanely extreme our wealth concentration problem is. The only way that a wealth tax rate of 2-3% can make a significant difference in the rest of the economy is if the people paying that tax have millions of times more wealth than everyone else. That’s right — MILLIONS OF TIMES more wealth.
The median net worth in America in 2017 was just $97,300. The average net worth in 2018 was 692,100. That difference — 692.1K vs 97.3K — jumps out at anyone who understands basic statistics.
The “median” is the value where there are as many datapoints above as below. The “average” is the total of all the data points divided by the number of data points.
If the sample is balanced between datapoints on the low side and datapoints on the high side, then the median and average for that sample are the same.
When the average is many times larger than the median — in this case, more than SEVEN times as high — it means that the wealth distribution is skewed towards to the top. In the case of the US wealth distribution, it means that a literal handful (on the order of a few dozen, perhaps a few hundred) of households have ENORMOUSLY more wealth than everybody below them.
Abigail Johnson is the wealthiest person in MA. Various sources put her 2019 net worth at about $14 Billion. Ms. Johnson is 143.9 THOUSAND times as wealthy as the median American household net worth. Jeff Bezos, the wealthiest person in the world in 2019 according to Forbes, had a net worth of about $131B in spring of 2019. That’s about NINE times more than Ms. Johnson.
Mr. Bezo’s is 1,3 MILLION times the 2017 median net worth in America. Taking just 3% of the net worth of Mr. Bezos generates $3.93 BILLION. A tiny amount from just ONE person — almost FOUR BILLION dollars.
Mr. Biden has spent a lifetime making sure that US economy and tax system benefits the wealthy and well-connected. He has said nothing to indicate that he would change anything about that if elected President.
So far as I can tell, the only current Democratic candidate who would work harder to protect the already-wealthy than Joe Biden is Mike Bloomberg.
There is a fair bit of that on his website.
@There is a fair bit of that …:
Really? I didn’t find it — I just went through pretty much the whole thing.
I found only one item that addresses wealth concentration, in “Joe’s Vision” -> “We’ve got to rebuild …” -> “Rewarding work, not wealth”:
The first two are things that of course need to be done.
The only item in the 2017 tax cut bill that affects wealth (as opposed to income) is the change in the estate tax, raising the threshold from $5.6M to $11.2M. While this should be reversed, that affects a very small number of households. Reversing that change without changing the estate tax rate accomplishes very little.
Politicians of both parties have been promising to eliminate special tax breaks and loopholes for as long as I’ve been alive. In the absence of specifics (and I find none on the website), it is meaningless. Massachusetts Republicans have offered this instead of tax increases at least as since 1980 and Prop 2 1/2.
Getting rid of the capital gains “loophole” is, again, necessary and not sufficient. A capital gains tax is still just another income tax. If the “capital gains loophole” is closed, then the army of tax professionals that work for the ultra-wealthy will simply restructure each portfolio to reduce or eliminate capital gains. With no capital gains, closing the loophole doesn’t raise a penny.
The website is a good example of LOTS of marketing fluff that, at least as it pertains to wealth concentration, has essentially zero substance.
In comparison, I invite you to examine a real proposal to address wealth concentration.
There really IS no comparison.
I’m not making a comparison. I’m just saying Biden does have positions that it was suggested he doesn’t have. If you think Warren’s are better, fine, but don’t say Biden doesn’t have any. I did actually have to dig a bit too, but there are references to addressing this under a variety of topics.
I’m not sure anybody asserted that Mr. Biden has no position on wealth concentration. I think the assertion is instead that Mr. Biden has acted to advance the economic interests of the wealthy and powerful.
My comment was a response to this:
I think Mr. Biden HAS taken a position on this question for his entire career. I see no evidence — certainly none on his website — that his current position on wealth concentration is any different than it’s been for his entire career.
I am satisfied with the positions he states on his website for THIS campaign, but then, maybe they really haven’t changed much which turns out to be an argument for the idea that they were better than he’s been given credit for to begin with.