|
|
|||
|
Navigation User login Who's online There are currently 2 users and 12 guests online.
Online users
Support OlyBlog OlyBlog is run by volunteers who care about Olympia. If you like what we're doing, make a donation: OlyBlog is powered by:
Who's new
 |
Submitted by Sarah on Thu, 01/11/2007 - 8:39am.
 Image In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self-purification; and direct action.Letter from Birmingham Jail
|
OlyBlog.net OlyBlog is devoted to citizen journalism, including hyperlocal news and discussion specifically about Olympia, Washington. If you care about this community and are tired of corporate media, then this is the place for you. If you'd like to contribute, please register for an account. Here is a list of local news beats that need to be covered. You can post your news as a personal blog entry, and it will be reviewed (and possibly edited) for promotion to the front page. Once you've established a record of responsible blogging, you can become an autonomous user. You can also send news via email. All members of OlyBlog agree to abide by our comment and fair use policies. If you are frustrated about something said in a comment thread, go here. Now playing at: 
Latest Classified Ads Upcoming events
 
|
|
|
More Flickr photos tagged with "olympia" and "washington" OlyBlog is a site for news and discussion about Olympia, Washington. |
|||
??
Submitted by Rob Richards on Thu, 01/11/2007 - 9:03am.The problem that I see with this is that you're negotiating with the very people that are commiting the injustices, where is that going to get you? Malcolm X once said, "You don't take your case to the criminal, you take your criminal to court!"
This is the problem that I've always had with King, he was asking for rights from the very people that violently oppressed him. Many people consider the civil rights movement of the sixties a "win", in that rights were given (does anybody find it odd at all that rights have to be asked for, and then given?), but those rights were not given because of the protests, they were given because the power structure found a way to profit off of it. Kind of like Lincoln freeing the slaves so that they would fight for the north.
“One man scorned and covered with scars still strove with his last ounce of courage to reach the unreachable stars; and the world was better for this.
I hear you
Submitted by Sarah on Thu, 01/11/2007 - 9:09am.negotiating
Submitted by Rob Richards on Thu, 01/11/2007 - 11:08am.Consider one dollar to equal equality, and five dollars to equal complete inequality. Meeting in the middle, in my eyes, is unnacceptable when rights are concerned.
“One man scorned and covered with scars still strove with his last ounce of courage to reach the unreachable stars; and the world was better for this.
Except that right are
Submitted by Norm on Thu, 01/11/2007 - 11:43am.Except that rights are supposedly already spelled out in the constitution. The only negotiation should be negotiating for the supreme court to hear your case, and rallying some folks who aren't part of your "crew" but who are supportive.
Equal rights may have come to pass, but you still aren't down to your $1.00 yet. When the laws passed you were barely at 4.50, society has changed as time has gone on and things are better now, but you aren't going to change everything through direct action. You'll just experience direct opposition.
My vote? Power in numbers, make your case as public as possible, find a way to be represented in the court system.
Of course it's a long road,
Submitted by Norm on Thu, 01/11/2007 - 12:03pm.Of course it's a long road, and then you have to hope that the lawyers have a heart.
http://www.theolympian.com/101/story/60101.html
My best guess
Submitted by Sarah on Thu, 01/11/2007 - 4:05pm.Direct action includes sitting at the whites only lunch counter.
Direct action encountering direct opposition can then inspire media coverage and wider discussion and an increase in actual support. That is the ideal anyway.
I should probably backtrack
Submitted by Norm on Thu, 01/11/2007 - 4:51pm.Direct action is bigger, and better, than the knee-jerk thought that comes into my mind.
Direct action was some of you folks dressing up and opposing the nazi's, which isn't my cup of tea, but is great in and of itself.
Direct action ala WTO protests = bad all around.
And unfortunately, a handful of bad apples getting into the crowd can turn a positive media coverage into a fiasco.
Again, not my cup of tea, but there is something to be said for it too.
Hostage negotiations
Submitted by Sarah on Thu, 01/11/2007 - 4:00pm.But. I wonder if this all is like hostage negotiations, in that we negotiate with someone intent on hurting others somehow. Instead of just shooting the person, we negotiate, for something that ideally we should not have to negotiate for. -Let her go and we will bring your wife here, deliver the pizza, and give you a phone with long distance.- (Silly example, but you know what I mean.)
To my mind, our basic human rights are being held hostage. Why on earth do any of us have to struggle and battle and negotiate for the right to have our relationships, including same sex relationships, honored and accorded all rights? The list is long and often we the hostages have to do the negotiating ourselves.
We don't have to struggle.
Submitted by Rob Richards on Thu, 01/11/2007 - 4:54pm.“One man scorned and covered with scars still strove with his last ounce of courage to reach the unreachable stars; and the world was better for this.
Ouch, that feels pretty
Submitted by Mike on Thu, 01/11/2007 - 7:27pm.I think when the students sat at the lunch counters in Memphis they were not asking for that right. They claimed that right. When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus, she was not asking for the right, she claimed that right.
I think MLK went to a lot of effort to avoid violence and violent confrontations with his campaigns, and he was sometimes seen as weak by folks like Malcolm X, Angela Davis, and Stokely Carmichael. He may have seemed hopelessly naive to brothers like Fred Hampton, Huey Newton, and Eldridge Cleaver. But I think it's a big mistake to think that he was "asking" for rights, I think that MLK Jr., Rosa Parks, the Memphis Lunch Counter students, the Freedom Riders into Mississippi, Medgar Evers, all of these people claimed their rights. The proclaimed their rights. They would not be denied their rights even if they were killed in the process.
The Civil Rights struggle of the 50s and 60s may look like it wasn't a "win" when we look back at it these days, but I grew up in the South way back when and I remember the water fountain for the "colored" folks in the City Hall and the poll tax and the absolute inequality of the "separate but equal" schools that served the most racially segregated children in the town where I grew up and believe me, I think something significant was accomplished.
We may have gone to sleep or just got dead tired of the fight after the assassinations of MLK, JFK, RFK, Fred Hampton, and others. We may have given up the fight in many ways when the country elected Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and turned public and foreign policy over to corporate lackeys, but I don't think that means we negotiated with them.
Direct action means direct action. Negotiation is a different process altogether. Direct action is standing in the road to prevent the military weapons from traveling through our community. If you are arrested and the weapons still go through, well so what? You don't always win with direct action, but it's not about negotiating.
And although I am really old, I don't personally remember the Lincoln years, but I don't think that the possibility of a "surge" of black soldiers against the Confederacy was not what moved Lincoln to announce the emancipation proclamation. The opposition to slavery in the US, the abolitionists, Lincoln among them, had been committed to a movement to end the slave trade for a very long time before the Civil War.
I don't mean to chide, but I think the history is important. I think the facts are important. I appreciate Sarah's work here posting the MLK information. He was a great man and a good man. God only knows what this country could have been with people like MLK and RFK with us in the 70s to keep the fires alive, but that was not to be and none of the rest of us filled their shoes. It was a shattering time to be alive with the terrible assassinations and the relentless toll of the Vietnam War. I think we did the best we could. I wish we had done better. It feels like Ronald Reagan and the idiot George Bush twins is what we got for our efforts.
I don't mean to sound dismissive, Mike.
Submitted by Rob Richards on Thu, 01/11/2007 - 7:57pm.What Malcolm X and Fred Hampton did that either led to thier eventual murders was deliver a message of empowerment. Malcolm's "by any means necessary" scared the hell out of the powers that be. People with power are concerned primarily with holding onto that power, and anybody that would dare try to convince the masses that they actually had power over a corrupt system needed to be dealt with.
I'm not trying to devalue the work of MLK, but without the "other side", the nationalist or more militant side, he would not be credited with the advances that he is credited with today.
“One man scorned and covered with scars still strove with his last ounce of courage to reach the unreachable stars; and the world was better for this.
Plenty of room at the table
Submitted by Sarah on Fri, 01/12/2007 - 7:58am.And I'm actually doing a radical act here, may not seem that way, but I am. Most of us see posters and articles and lesson plans on MLK as mainstream but to another group of people, this man represents all that is evil and despicable in the world. Whole lotta hatred out there and it is popular to use this time of year to express it.
We stand on the shoulders of our ancestors which include folks like Fannie Lou Hamer and Viola Liuzzo and Judi Bari and so many others.
Pacifism is a loaded term.
Submitted by Mike on Fri, 01/12/2007 - 8:59am.There's a movie out there about a fictional meeting between Malcolm and Martin in a hotel room. It's wonderful and captures their tense partnership. I can't remember the title. It's been a decade or two since I last watched it. It's not an easy watch. It got me all riled up again. Injustice and stupidity make me angry, so in the US today, that makes me an angry guy.
Bringing the war home really put the kiss of death on the 60's. Bringing the war home was the idea of the most radical elements of the opposition - the weathermen mainly, I guess. A sense that the US would just never wake up to the terrible violence we were perpetrating in Vietnam unless there were buildings exploding in the US. That led to a backlash of the "hardhats" of 1968 and the shift of the dependably democratic block vote of the south (still mad at the party of Lincoln as late as 1964) and gave us Presidents Nixon, Reagan and the idiot Bush twins. But as I recall, the real explosion of bringing the war home happened after MLK's assassination when there was an explosion of rage in the black neighborhoods of the cities. Detroit, Watts, and other places just exploded that summer. The war was home, but the biggest part of that war was about the failure, the weakness of King's non-violent approach which was shown most clearly when a single person with a sniper rifle took him out. That assassination remains poorly examined. The purported shooter - Ray - was all over the place, traveling on the run, where did the money come from to keep him running? Follow the money.
But whatever the investigation might show, the poor black folks in the US knew that the KKK pulled truly pulled the trigger. These entrenched interests, racist, corporate, militant, and brutally committed to the efficiency of simply shooting down the folks who posed a real challenge to the status quo were a force to be reckoned with. I think they won. After JFK, Hampton, MLK, RFK, the wind was just gone from the sails for change. Nixon took over. The worst, most criminal president of my lifetime. I think Nixon may have been more criminal than W, but it may just be that the corporate polish of W's criminality provides cover.
Stand up, we will shoot you down. It was pretty intimidating. Don't discount King's contribution. He believed he would be killed for standing up. And he continued to stand up. It's not about who gets a federal holiday named for them. He stood up for a lot of us and when the "mainstream" opposition like King and Bobby Kennedy got shot down, it was clear that it wasn't just the easy marks like Hampton who would be killed.
word
Submitted by Rob Richards on Fri, 01/12/2007 - 10:16am.There is a saying, attributed to Vogue magazine, that goes: "A camel is a horse designed by committee". It's a pejoritive maxim which is meant to make light of work by a group in the absense of leadership, at least that's my understanding (with a little wikihelp).
Now, I think the intended purpose of the maxim is all wrong. I look at the camel and think, "wow, that's better than horse". One person, one leader, would have created the horse, a beautiful, proud creature, strong and reliable. A committee surely designed the camel, not pretty, not couth, but damn if it's not a hell of a lot more useful than a horse, especially when it comes to traveling long distances in harsh weather.
Perhaps if the civil rights movement had worked on empowering people a little more, and urged them to follow leaders a little less, it would have survived the Nixon/Reagan/Bush desert.
“One man scorned and covered with scars still strove with his last ounce of courage to reach the unreachable stars; and the world was better for this.
Does appearance = truth?
Submitted by Sarah on Fri, 01/12/2007 - 10:46am.But does appearance = truth? I think there are many more empowered people than we know. Most likely they are really really busy because there is a lot of work still to do. Our media doesn't cover these folks anywhere near how much they cover or uncover entertainment constructs such as a Paris Hilton. But just because it appears that the civil rights movement is moribund (I had to double check that definition myself, I surely love words, but don't always know what the heck I'm talking about) does not mean that it actually is.
Camels are needed for the long haul through the harsh weather. I believe there are more camels out there and in here than we know.
Great souls are rare. The
Submitted by Mike on Fri, 01/12/2007 - 9:05pm.Looking back and wondering what happened to all that optimism and idealism of the 60's I think a big part of was the calculated murder of the articulate leaders. The brits could not stop Gandhi in part because it never occurred to them to take him seriously, to just kill him and be prepared to ride out the politcal storm that would follow.
And it wasn't just one assassination or three. It was one assassination after another. An articulate, intelligent, compassionate soul would stand up and be killed. Listen to JFK's Pax American speech and try to imagine hearing that speech (June 1963) and then having this man assassinated less than six months later. Another thing that happened was the relentless stupidity and mayhem of the Vietnam war.
The Vietnam war really kicked into gear with JFK dead. Listen to that Pax American speech and ask yourself: would the guy who made this speech have bought into the escalation of the Vietnam war?
Well he was dead. It was a shock and a catastrophe. His voice was silenced. Say what you will about human beings, great leaders, great souls who speak from their hearts are persuasive and rare. I was eleven years old. We had 16,000 troops in Vietnam.
A year later, (1964) King wins the Nobel Peace Prize for his civil rights work and Vietnam was starting to cook. At the end of 1965 we had 184,000 troops in Vietnam. I was thirteen.
It was April of 1967 when King finally came out against the Vietnam war in a major way. Read this speech. Listen to this speech. A year to the day later King was dead. I was fifteen years old. We had 537,000 troops in Vietnam.
King was gone. His voice was silenced. It was a great loss and a catastrophe.
Several cities in the country exploded in flames and riots later that year. There was a pent up frustration that was palpable.
Eugene McCarthy was challenging LBJ for the nomination of the democratic party and people were proud to be associated with and working for Gene. Once he showed that the country was ready to vote to stop the war, LBJ bowed out and Bobby Kennedy jumped into the campaign. Bobby was much more charismatic than McCarthy. This show was on the road.
It was hard for the early peace folks who were with Gene McCarthy watch the more politically cautious Bobby finally decide he could take on LBJ on the war issue and just sweep past McCarthy, but the idealism of the Kennedys was something that maybe you had to experience, it felt like destiny that Bobby would be President after the 1968 election. But of course, after winning the California primary, Bobby bit the dust in the kitchen at the Ambassador Hotel. That voice was silenced. There was a dream unfulfilled of the end of the Vietnam war just around the corner.
That was a catastrophe. It was a great loss. Bobby Kennedy was gone.
Nixon got elected on a law and order backlash vote with his "secret plan" to end the war (after interfering in the Paris peace talks where an actual end to the war likely would have prevented Nixon's election). Of course he had no plan or intention to end the war. March 1969, Nixon ordered the secret bombing of Cambodia. The bombing continued for years. It is estimated that 100,000 Cambodians were killed. 2 million became homeless. The Khmer Rouge and the killing fields were on the horizon. I was seventeen. Salvador Allende, a physician and socialist, was elected President of Chile to be killed three years later by Henry Kissinger's CIA coup.
My draft lottery took place in August 1971. I was number 167. I was 1A, no student deferment. My CO status turned down. Being the son of a WWII CO was not persuasive evidence that I had a truly conscientious objection to war. I didn't bother to appeal, I figured I was going to jail or I was going to Canada. I was not going to pick up a weapon and start shooting Vietnamese or Cambodian people. Lt. Calley was convicted of murder in the My Lai massacre. We had about 140,000 troops in Vietnam and environs.
That was some time. A war that just went on and on. No way to stop it. Millions of Vietnamese and Cambodians killed. 50 something thousand US troops killed. A string of potential leaders who might have stopped or somehow reduced the killing shot down. It was not just one or three leaders. It was a bloodbath.
The three people I mention - JFK, King, RFK - might have prevented hundreds of thousands of deaths. It was a catastrophe. We were shell shocked when it was finally over and Ronald Reagan was in the wings with a great smile, a little dementia and some hearing loss. Yes, that was a time.
Here we go again. Let's free the Iraqis. Let's bomb Somalia. Let's get those Iranians. They hate us for our freedoms.
I do miss the intelligent, articulate soulful speeches of Martin Luther King Jr., JFK and Bobby Kennedy. I miss the rhetorical passion of Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Fred Hampton and others.
Today we have Mr. Bring Em On. Mr. Mission Accomplished. God help us.
I won't say it very often...
Submitted by Norm on Sat, 01/13/2007 - 12:00am.SO mark it on your calendar.
Mike, that was a great write-up. I've read more history books than I can remember, and you put 2 decades into a very inviting article.
Thank you. That was my
Submitted by Mike on Sat, 01/13/2007 - 6:59am.Arizona
Submitted by Sarah on Fri, 01/12/2007 - 9:05am.Negotiation
Submitted by Robert Whitlock on Thu, 01/11/2007 - 10:33pm.That would be like George Bush saying, well, we told them to show us their WMD, and they didn't - so we were forced to assault them.
Negotiations must be part of any movement for change. Even when they don't seem to be working as well as desired - they are vital. They must be maintained even when the movement has taken up other means, nonviolent direct action for example.
In the Course of Events
maintenance of negotiations
Submitted by Robert Whitlock on Thu, 01/11/2007 - 10:35pm.In the Course of Events
if you had enough people on
Submitted by Rob Richards on Thu, 01/11/2007 - 10:43pm.“One man scorned and covered with scars still strove with his last ounce of courage to reach the unreachable stars; and the world was better for this.