Why we can’t wait.

Two of my kids were in Washington and here they are visiting the Lincoln Memorial in August 2022. I was born in October 1963 following a summer of unrest for Black Civil Rights in the USA. The summer peaked on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Aug 28th, 1963 when Martin Luther King Jr. addressed a crowd of 250,000 supporters who marched to the capital for Jobs and Freedom.

His speech, almost a sermon, is known as the “I have a dream” speech. It formed the core of his subject for the book he published in the following year “Why we can’t wait”. I grew up in a white Irish household with a copy of that book on our bookshelf. The Civil Rights movement of the USA became a model and a template for the Civil Rights Movement in Northern Ireland.

Today we need to take a leaf from the playbook of Martin Luther King Jr. and apply it to the issue of Climate Change. We need to highlight the fierce urgency of now. There is no time for cooling off, because we are heating up. The weak promises of democracy need to be exchanged for hard actions. National interests rooted in old colonial competitive paradigms need to be set aside so that the world can work together as one. The cause of Climate is the cause of Racism. The Sweltering Summer of 2022 set heat records all over he world and while whites suffer in the heat people of color die in drought and conflagration. There is no such thing as “Business As Usual” when it is the economics of exploitation and depletion which have brought us to this juncture. The tranquilizing drug of gradualism will kill us. The earth will abide, the future of humans remains in the balance.

The following is an excerpt from the MLK speech and the full text is on this LINK

We have also come to his hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.

Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quick sands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. 1963 is not an end, but a beginning. Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual.

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The function of discrimination

Toni Morrison, the Pulitzer Prize winning and Nobel Laureate author of 11 novels came up with this:

The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.

It’s not only racism. Distraction is the goal of all forms of discrimination be it gender, marital status, family status, age disability, sexual orientation, race, or religion. Just knowing this, having this insight, is a huge benefit to those suffering from discrimination.

And this brings me to an unexpected bridge I was unaware of. If you read my blog you may have seen I like the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance. I learned recently that Langston Hughes corresponded with Nina Simone creating a bridge between The Great Migration and the Civil Rights Movement. For Toni Morrison it was Nina Simone who as the high priestess of soul “saved our lives”. These three writers draw a straight line through the struggle for civil rights from Hughes birth in 1901 to the death of Morrison in 2019. In the course of that 118 years the USA has moved from Jim Crow to Black Lives Matter, from policemen hanging “strange fruit” from trees to shooting children in the back.

Racism is distraction and white America is doing a powerful good job at distraction.

Three days after the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Nina Simone performed at a concert, telling the audience at the Westbury Music Fair “The King is Dead”.

One of the songs she performed, Backlash Blues, references her relationship with Hughes. Other than the Vietnam reference you could sing the same song today:

Yeah, yeah

So, Mr. Backlash, Backlash
Who do you think I am?
You raise my taxes, freeze my wages
Send my son to Vietnam

You give me second class houses
And second class schools
Do you think that all colored people
Are just second class fools?

Mr. Backlash
I’m gon’ leave you with the blues, yes I am

When I try to find a job
To earn a little cash
All you got to offer
Is your mean, old white backlash

But the world is big
Big and bright and round
And it’s full of other folks like me
Who are black, yellow, beige and brown

Mr. Backlash
I’m gon’ leave you with the blues, yes I am

When Langston Hughes died
When he died, he told me many months before
He said, “Nina, keep on working
’til they open up the door
One of these days when you made it
And the doors are open wide
Make sure you tell them exactly where it’s at
So they’ll have no place to hide”

So Mr. Backlash
Mr. Backlash
Hear me now
I’m warning you, yeah
Somehow, someway, yeah
I’m gonna leave you
With the blues

When the language pauses the killing begins.

Harvey Shapiro was a WW2 B17 (Flying Fortress) tail gunner who flew for the USAF over Europe. After the war he became an academic, a writer and a poet. When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was imprisoned Shapiro advised that he write from jail in the manner of Gandhi. The result was The Letter from Birmingham Jail.

Shapiro was born on this day in 1924.

For Delmore Schwartz; by Harvey Shapiro

1

How do they go on living?
How does anyone go on living?
A woman kills her three children
in 1954. In 1966 she kills
another three. And the husband
continues to go to work
at the same job. Which
is to be judged insane?
And we keep walking the same
roads, past mayhem, slaughter
of innocents – this morning, the granny
curled up beside her bottle
of Petri wine at a side door
of the Paramount – every day,
leading sensible lives.
The sirens seem never to stop,
even in the country, amid
crickets or ocean sound.
What we all know,
what keeps humming in the back
of the brain. When the language
pauses, the killing begins.

2

Your intelligence was so clear
in your first poems, like
Mozart in his music,
yet it could not help you,
as you said,
when the old arguments,
the din around the family table,
grew louder all about you –
the arguments we endlessly rehearse
when mind loses its own motion.
Then our jaws lock into the face
we had, on the words we said
under our breath, to ourselves,
to our underselves, so fiercely deep
they were for years beyond hearing,
and now do all the talking.

3

Disturbed by dreams,
I wake into the chilled morning.
The dreams are rich
with patterns of rejection
(Mother, Wife) suicide and loss.
A victim of such disasters,
when I awake I judge myself
harshly and long.
Four A.M. on a vacation morning.
The surf takes over in my head, a running
commentary, a Greek chorus,
saying something like, nothing but the sea.
In my universe of feeling,
I can hear the sea. These dreams,
bits of genre, Vienese pastry,
from which I awake, stuffed
with bourgeois living, these dreams
of the dead fathers I believe in…

Work of a lifetime

Born in 1950 in Derry, Northern Ireland,  Martin McGuinness grew up in the worst era for Catholics in Northern Ireland.  They were discriminated against so badly in Protestant Northern Ireland that they emulated Black Americans such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. in setting up non-violent civil rights protests against the regime.

Through the 1960’s just as in America, the ruling class escalated the use of violence to break the protests.  McGuinness joined the IRA and was, at only 21 years of age, the second in command of the Derry Provisional IRA when British Paratroopers murdered 14 civil rights protesters in Bloody Sunday.

He was imprisoned, treated as a terrorist by a British Regime under Maggie Thatcher.  A British Government that seemed hell bent on destroying the nationalist cause by violence, intolerance and general all round hatefulness.

Elected to Stormont in 1982 in the wake of the hunger strikes and the death of Bobby Sands he, like all Sinn Féin, did not take his seat.

McGuinness went on to become the chief negotiator of the Good Friday Agreement and he took personal responsibility for disarming the IRA.

On this day, his birthday, in 1998 the people of Northern Ireland voted on the Agreement in a referendum.  75% of the people of Northern Ireland voted for peace.

Think about that.  25% of the Northern Irish wanted to continue the violence, the death and destruction.  Who are these people?

McGuinness was cast by his enemies as a villain and a terrorist.  But this is a man who worked tirelessly for peace all his life.  A short life in the end.  He passed away last year aged only 66.

Martin lived to see his life’s work come to fruition.  Northern Ireland is not a finished object and there is a long road to go to reconciliation.  That 25% of nay sayers is still up there looking to bring the whole thing crashing down about our ears.  Don’t let them.

 

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Excuse my dust

Born on this day in 1893 Dorothy Parker, writer & poet is possibly best known for her famous wit.  Her one liners are sharp as a knife.  Lines like “A girls best friend is her mutter” or “The cure for boredom is curiosity, there is no cure for curiosity”.  Her wit developed at an early age when she lost her mother and her father remarried.  She refused to call her stepmother anything civil and referred to her as the housekeeper.

She joked that she married to cover up her Jewish background and avoid anti-Semitism.  She was an avid anti-fascist and became aligned with left leaning politics in the 1930s. She was blacklisted in Hollywood in the 1950s McCarthy era as a communist.

“Excuse my dust” was her suggestion for her epitaph.  When she died in 1967 she bequeathed her estate to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. After his death her estate passed on to the NCAAP.  In 1988 they claimed her ashes and erected a memorial garden to her in their Baltimore headquarters.

One Perfect Rose : by Dorothy Parker

A single flow’r he sent me, since we met.
All tenderly his messenger he chose;
Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet –
One perfect rose.

I knew the language of the floweret;
‘My fragile leaves,’ it said, ‘his heart enclose.’
Love long has taken for his amulet
One perfect rose.

Why is it no one ever sent me yet
One perfect limousine, do you suppose?
Ah no, it’s always just my luck to get
One perfect rose.

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Happy Birthday Countee Cullen

African Americans had a brief flowering of liberty and creativity in the Reconstruction Era following the Civil War in the USA.  This was brought to a sharp end by the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and the passing of the Jim Crow laws.

In the 1920’s there was a cultural, social and literary flowering of creativity by the grandchildren of the reconstruction era negroes.  Known at the time as the New Negro Movement it is now called the Harlem Renaissance.  Countee Cullen was one of the leading lights of this movement.

This poem is interesing to me because it is so evocative of the WB Yeats “He Wishes for the cloths of heaven”.  While Yeats wrote of the lovers angst Cullen’s poem speaks of discrimination and racism.  Here we are today 100 years on from the Harlem Renaissance and it seems that the struggle for equality for African Americans has seen little advance.  Despite the Civil Rights movement, the Black Panther Party, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X the USA still appears to be dangerous ground on which to be a black person.

For a Poet; by Countee Cullen

I have wrapped my dreams in a silken cloth,
And laid them away in a box of gold;
Where long will cling the lips of the moth,
I have wrapped my dreams in a silken cloth;
I hide no hate; I am not even wroth
Who found the earth’s breath so keen and cold;
I have wrapped my dreams in a silken cloth,
And laid them away in a box of gold.

Why we can’t wait

 

Took all the trees, put them in a tree museum
And they charged the people
A dollar and a half just to seem ’em
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone
Paved paradise, put up a parking lot

……………………………..Big Yellow Taxi;  Joni Mitchell