Would Martin Luther King be a leader today? Who is our King today? I have spent the day wondering why I cannot write about him and his legacy in the civil rights movement. I ran from thought to thought but was over come by the stillness of my fingers upon the keyboard. I could no more cough out a phrase or two, parrot back something good he said, or even write a brief poem about him. 

Then I read Sally Swift's work and a little about her life and what she has accomplished. I never cease to be amazed by the quality of her writing and now about some more of her life experiences. There are many of us here on Open Salon who have led some lives which shaped the lives of others, that are colored by our experiences with great people, that are melded into the universe of trying to do good. I could name many more people, right here among us who I have discovered through their words and work, something unique and special about, somehow that they have played a role in our histories, or shaped some of our visions of what the world could be.

Some of those people were in our schools, in our communities, leading on some issue or another, or creating art or music or poetry to express what we were all feeling in our hearts, enhancing our collective feelings on important incidents and times for our nation, our environment, our world. There are soldiers here who fought on the fields of battle, in the air, on the sea, who did not ask the qualifications of their leaders, question their authority, they just did what they were asked to do, they were commanded and they answered the call.

Our job here has always been to make sure that those leading were taking us where we needed to go. So the soldier would not enter a wrongly called war, or follow an order that was against our own beliefs and constitution. Our  job here was and is to preserve the strides that have been taken to better our nation. We fought and struggled, we made change that we knew was for the good of our nation and now it seems that much of it is at stake.

Who is responsible to climb the mountain, to see the direction to lead. Is it really the Palins, the Becks, the Koch brothers? It is really the scoundrels who have achieved power through money and influence? Are we better than this? Do we sit back and take comfort that the work before us has already been done? I think not. We elected Obama for a reason and they want him to disappear, they want to take his achievements and his direction and flush it down, down, down with all the other things that put a leader like him in office in the first place. Are we really going to let them? Can we afford to let them win?

 This is no bobby sock parade of the past, this, what we have today, is built on the foundation of blood, inequality, lynchings and hatred, it was OVERCOME. It was a dark time, that went on more than a fortnight in this country, that brought the leader Martin Luther King to the forefront of our consciousness and activism.

 Do we dare turn back the clock to visions of bobbed hair, poodle skirts and our fantasy of ignorance that some would have us believe was the American utopia, when girls were girls and knew their place, when white was the superior race, when achievement meant something that was defined by race, gender and money?

I cringed when they sanitized Mark Twain. I wrote on Alan Nothnagle's post and also Jonathan Wolfman's the same comment. " I might be uninformed, but I cannot think of anything else that was censored in such a way or would need to be censored in such a way. Not in this country. I don't think the publisher should have the right to alter anyone's work, once published and in circulation. It is ridiculous. Should Mein Kampf be censored? Banned perhaps, but censored? Censoring alters the fundamental train of thought in a book, the basic message. You can rewrite what you think you must for television, video, theater, but the book itself? The book in its original form is the springboard of more ideas than what is even showcased therein, to alter it is to chisel a new nose on G-d."

You don't have to believe or agree with what someone has written. You can have an opinion about it, disclaim it, ban it from young people who might not understand it in it's context, but when you manipulate ideas, change their meaning, you make yourself no better than the very people you are fight against, I think. That is free speech. Mark Twain, for goodness sake, what next? What more must be sanitized for the masses?When we can't say the word they removed? Well, it was said, it did exist and it was and is offensive. The foundation of it was part of the American fabric of consciousness. Mark Twain knew that, we knew that for decades when we read it. Some didn't say it because we read it in Twain, we changed our reality in this country because we read it in Twain and we understood it, the harm in it, the context of it and how we moved beyond it as a nation.

Yes, words have power. Unleashed power for good and evil and when a Palin invokes them, like blood libel, I demonize her for the ignorant puppet of the right she is and for her party. Her party which is a sham and invokes our most hated lines of demarcation and makes us re coil like a snake when we use it's  hate filled language in our everyday life, making putting a person in cross hairs, part of the political language.

So how do we deal with the Palins, the Becks, the Kochs and the others? Do we censor their ideas? No, we must become more powerful in our rejection of their vision, their ideas. We must speak up and be known. We must vision better, organize better, reject them and their hatred better. It has been done before, Gandhi, King, and so many more leaders, responded to violence with non violence. They did respond, they did 'fight', they did overcome.

We shall overcome. We need a call to action and on this day, we remember, it can be done. We can overcome. We shall overcome. 

Copyright 2011 by SheilaTGTG55