I STILL ‘HAVE A DREAM’
It was 46 years ago today that Martin Luther King delivered his famous ‘I Have A Dream Speech’ at the Great March on Washington for Peace and Freedom. To see a video of the complete speech, click HERE.
I was there along with a quarter of a million fellow Americans. It was the most gratifying day of my life as I was on the organising committee for that March the entire summer. To witness such a success was most rewarding. To hear the words of the great Dr. King, spoken live, were most encouraging. The last paragraph of his speech is the part that has stayed with me every day of my life since then…
“And when this happens, When we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”
But…what I see in every day life in Israel reminds me that those words are still just a dream. We have a long way to go before it becomes a reality.
I see discrimination daily… it is as ugly now as it was 46 years ago. I see it more from Americans in Israel than from anyone else… here is an incident that occurred just the other day…
I was in a gift shop and an American tourist entered. The conversation went as follows…
Tourist— Do you have any Arab toy soldiers?
Clerk— No, why would you want them anyway?
Tourist— So I can teach my grandson how to kill them.
Me— Have you ever met an Arab?
Tourist— Of course not, I keep away from them because they all want to kill me.
Me— I have met thousands of Arabs, I have never met one that wants to kill me, but I have met hundreds of American Jews, like yourself, that want to kill Arabs.
What possesses a person to be so hateful? What possible reason could there be, was he trying to impress the clerk with his ‘machoness’, his reverent zionism, or was it just plain stupidity? My guess is that it was the latter. But I do see a rise in this hatred being imported from the United States. The most extremes of the Judeo nazis of the past were also imports, the kahanas, the goldsteins , may their names be erased from memory. It must not be tolerated or it will be thought of as acceptable thought. It isn’t.
Israel has tried openly to show their opposition to this type of thought. Racism is illegal in Israel(in the books), racist orgnisations are outlawed (in the books)… we all know that is a load of bull! Racism is alive and well in Israel… and is strengthened by the hatred that is imported from the States.
I want to see the dream fulfilled… I want to see a world without hatred. I want to see an Israel/Palestine without walls, I want to see peace.
Perhaps if we all go back to the top of this post, click on the speech and listen to it carefully, more of us will realise that there is another way….
‘DEEP IN MY HEART, I DO BELIEVE, WE SHALL OVERCOME ONE DAY.’
The above is an annual repost
Desertpeace 
brian said,
August 28, 2009 at 07:43
turns out it was only a dream…
robertsgt40 said,
August 28, 2009 at 18:47
“But what I see in every day life in Israel reminds me that those words are still just a dream. We have a long way to go before it becomes a reality.” No wonder they croaked him with comments like these. They got Joe Kenedy Jr., JFK, JFK Jr., and RFK for their father crossing Edgar Bronfman. “never forgive, never forget” comes to mind
TacG said,
August 28, 2009 at 19:08
that “dream” has continued to be a nightmare for the very reasons this poster stated -even in the U.S. or AmeriKKKa… it’s only in the books and spoken as niceties, we still (Africans born in the U.S.) get lynched by their shitstem daily! police gun us down and get off scott free, they cotinue to force the drug economy on our community and reap all the benefits, it was said a few years back that Marijuana was a 30+billion dollar industry a year… you cant find any traces of that in the ghettos, we dont have the boats, we dont have the planes, we dont own any factories, it has been proven that the CIA set up funded the crack/cocaine epidemic of the 80s and early 90s… but we are the criminals, too much evidence linking drugs money to the ruling class yet the policies and movements of the so called govt show a different picture, dont forget Katrina, any slum in the country reinforces my view, that good old AmerikKKan dream is a nightmare exported the world over personified in rogue settlements like Isra-hell… FREE PALASTINE, FREE AFRICA, FREE ALL POOR AND OPPRESSED NATIONS FROM CORRUPT CORPORATIONS SUPPPORTED BY YOUR GOVTS -and IF the Germans killed jews make Israel in Europe somewhere. stop sending my tax dollars to kill brown folk the world over… gah we need that money right here in AmeriKKKa, I have seen no “change” i have no “hope” i did not vote for Obama or any other corrupt politician ever… there is only one solution and that is revolution, after Bush coup I and Bush coup II everyone was ready to revolt… along comes Obama corporate/white power in a black face… easier to swallow i guess but if not the same worse results for the masses
Aufzuleiden said,
August 29, 2009 at 15:03
Dreams only die when the dreams are allowed to be forgotten. Just imagine what would have happened if everyone who was at that march went back home and became a genuine agent for change. Rather than just talking about ‘having been there’ and reminiscing about how wonderful it was they could have used the event as a rallying cry to galvanize their cause, to collectively join together – both black and white, Jew and Gentile, to create the America that was dying to be born.
After the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. the dream didn’t die, the man did; the dream, however, became something of a hallowed fantasy that was more spoken of in whispers of awe rather than in the tones of something that could actually be accomplished. Even with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, after the assassination of JFK, a bill that was brought to fruition with the help of a junior senator from Massachusetts, Edward M. Kennedy, there was not as much support as there should have been for the simple reason that the ‘movement’ found it difficult to separate their hatred of Lyndon Johnston and his involvement in Vietnam.
Once Martin Luther King, Jr. was out of the way the civil rights movement was right where the south wanted it; instead of having a galvanizing force to keep the blacks, whites, Jews, and others colours of the rainbow working together for a single cause there was now a myriad of agendas competing to be heard. This allowed the southern states to react to the new laws without worrying about pesky ‘leftists’ from the north as they were seemingly less interested in risking their lives now that their guiding light had been removed from the picture.
Perhaps that sounded cynical; good, it was supposed to sound cynical. There is nothing worse than taking something like the messages delivered by Dr King and dismissing them, saying they have not been achieved, or will not be achieved, without asking the very serious question: why not. What is the cause of the failure? Where there not enough people invested in the cause that this should not have succeeded with flying colours? Of course, the answer is that it should have been an overwhelming success; there is no reason on earth for the cause of civil rights to have been stalled in the United States, unless there is an inherently racist nature in a certain part of the nation that is resistant to the entire prospect of civil rights and liberties. In fact, one might actually begin to believe that there is a portion of America that would be perfectly happy to re-institute the old lynching laws where it was legal to hang ‘colored’ folks from trees if’n there was a witness to the wrong doin’, especially if one of them dared to look at a white girl askance, or was uppity enough not to step off of the sidewalk when white folk were approaching from the other direction.
God forbid these colored folk learned their letters. You know what they says about ‘educated Negroes’, don’t you? Well, actually, I can’t recall, but it can’t be good, can’t it?
Give me a break. The end of the Jim Crow laws was the best thing to happen to America since the end of the Civil War, until the rise of the Civil Rights Movement – but when that movement did not, en masse, renew itself and turn out to support the initiatives that came out – the Civil Rights Act and the Voter Rights Act – they lost their vision, they lost their teeth, they lost their cause.
Certainly, there was great merit to the Civil Rights Movement morphing into the ‘Peace’ movement, and the ‘Anti-War’ movement – but, unfortunately, the organizers were very narrow minded in the focus and could not see the forest for the trees. They did not understand that there was a marked difference between the domestic policies of a government and their foreign policies. Was Johnson involved in an outrageous, unlawful war in Vietnam? Certainly – it was horrible and should not have been allowed to continue. However, what he was trying to do on the ‘home front’ was an entirely different matter and that, regardless of the war, deserved the support of those who had been fighting for the rights of others; those pieces of legislation proved to be fundamental for the future of the advancement of Civil Rights in America, regardless of whether or not ‘the movement’ was there to support those who created the legislative language. They simply missed the boat.
History is often a recounting of the stories telling us about lost opportunities or seemingly unique occurrences that led to a totally unlikely outcome. In the history of the Civil Rights Movement the name of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. will never easily be forgotten, but the acts of his many followers – after his death – will go down as one of the greatest losses of potential political power the United States has ever known.
It reminds me, very much, of what happened when a ‘community organizer’ rallied the support of grass-roots individuals, using the Internet and anything else at his disposal to create an irresistible atmosphere that countered anything his opponents could muster. People have been intent on trashing his presidency without giving him a chance to do his job, but it is always easier to judge than to allow someone the opportunity to do what they have promised. After all, before he was elected, did the previous president include the spending on the war in the numbers on the debt? No. Why? Because it looked bad; on the other hand, this guy has – but it looks bad – yes, it does, but it is truth. Now he gets blamed for it; how sad. Short memories make things like George W. Bush possible.
It also makes the passing of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. even sadder for we forget how often the dream is invoked, and then forgotten. Why forget? Pick it up and carry that dream; it encompasses all that America has not yet achieved, all that it can be, all that it should be, all the promise that has not yet been fulfilled by those words, ‘We the people,’ – a declaration that rings hollow if it does not represent all of America and only part of the nation.
That is a tragedy from which there can be no recovery.
Wie viel ist aufzuleiden!