"You may well ask: "Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?"
You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed,
this is the very purpose of direct action.
Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension."
I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth.
Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.
The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation
so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.
I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue...
We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation.
For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied...”
Let us consider a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal.
By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal.
Let me give another explanation.
A law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of being denied the right to vote, had no part in enacting or devising the law. Who can say that the legislature of Alabama [Georgia, Dan] which set up that state's segregation laws was democratically elected? Throughout Alabama [Georgia, Dan] all sorts of devious methods are used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters, and there are some counties in which, even though Negroes constitute a majority of the population, not a single Negro is registered. Can any law enacted under such circumstances be considered democratically structured?"
Read King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail...
https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html
4 comments:
Jesus Christ!
Written by a christian convert, former Republican:
"My Republican friends report vicious divisions in their churches and families. Republican politicians who don’t toe the Trump line are speaking of death threats and menacing verbal attacks. It’s as if the Trump base felt some security when their man was at the top, and that’s now gone.
Maybe Trump was the restraining force. (OH MY GOD!)
What’s happening can only be called a venomous panic attack. Since the election, large swaths of the Trumpian right have decided America is facing a crisis like never before and they are the small army of warriors fighting with Alamo-level desperation to ensure the survival of the country as they conceive it.
The first important survey data to understand this moment is the one pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson discussed with my colleague Ezra Klein. When asked in late January if politics is more about “enacting good public policy” or “ensuring the survival of the country as we know it,” 51 percent of Trump Republicans said survival; only 19 percent said policy.
The level of Republican pessimism is off the charts. A February Economist-YouGov poll asked Americans which statement is closest to their view: “It’s a big, beautiful world, mostly full of good people, and we must find a way to embrace each other and not allow ourselves to become isolated” or “Our lives are threatened by terrorists, criminals and illegal immigrants, and our priority should be to protect ourselves.”
Over 75 percent of Biden voters chose “a big, beautiful world.” Two-thirds of Trump voters chose “our lives are threatened.”
This level of catastrophism, nearly despair, has fed into an amped-up warrior mentality.
“The decent know that they must become ruthless. They must become the stuff of nightmares,” Jack Kerwick writes in the Trumpian magazine American Greatness. “The good man must spare not a moment to train, in both body and mind, to become the monster that he may need to become in order to slay the monsters that prey upon the vulnerable.”
With this view, the Jan. 6 insurrection was not a shocking descent into lawlessness but practice for the war ahead. A week after the siege, nearly a quarter of Republicans polled said violence can be acceptable to achieve political goals. William Saletan of Slate recently rounded up the evidence showing how many Republican politicians are now cheering the Jan. 6 crowd, voting against resolutions condemning them."
In his rebuttal to you, Stan writes, "It's like the conscience. Sometimes we know things are wrong somehow without even being able to quote the rule or reason.... Now, we can sear our consciences... Sin, then, is a violation of what is good or bad, not "harmful or harmless."
Put me down as NOT shocked that Stan doesn't think searing consciences is harmful.
This is, obviously how White Supremacy has behaved. There is not doubt that slavery seared the conscience. But we white people developed an apparatus of inner justifications to claim that slaver was NOT harm. Indeed, this is the very beginning of making a people we call white people. Before slavery there was no such as white people.
So, Stan just replicated white supremacist identity making which is based, as it was in the beginning, on a psychology of Calvinist juridical theology. Humanity is all depraved from root to branch. Only those of us on whom god has bestowed grace carry anything that might possibly sanctify anything about human activity.
It is an accident, a secret in the cloud of god's unknowable wisdom that we are the chosen, the elect. Charged with carrying out the sanctification of depraved human beings around the globe as agents of god's whip end of love.
If we as a nation were to have believed as Stan - depending on a book - then we would still have slavery. If it were not the imposition of laws written by those who listened to their conscience, if we left it up to god fearing white men, there would still be slavery.
It was exceptionally god-fearing protestants that first brought slaves to these northern shores.
___
And what does scripture say about the law?
Deuteronomy: "No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe. See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I am commanding you today, by loving the Lord your God, walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, decrees, and ordinances, then you shall live and become numerous, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to possess. But if your heart turns away and you do not hear..."
Clearly not descriptive law. And just as clearly, god, at least, believes that we know the good, that your hearts recognize and our mouths speak the good; and our brains can process and analyze the world and trod the paths of godliness and we can follow the good.
How? By loving god.
Romans: "When Gentiles, who do not possess the law, do instinctively what the law requires, these, though not having the law, are a law to themselves. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, to which their own conscience also bears witness; and their conflicting thoughts will accuse or perhaps excuse them on the day when, according to my gospel, God, through Jesus Christ, will judge the secret thoughts of all."
So, here, too, the law is not a book. The law is in ourselves. And living a godly life requires nothing like a book. Nothing like a church. Nothing like Jesus. The world over lives by conscience and has encoded the witness of conscience into a system of written laws.
The conscience is our moral law. And our conscience operates unconsciously, signaling its offense using signaling emotions to strike our consciousness. This is the very operation of moral law that constitutes human nature.
And it is evolutionarily progressive. We are taught by harm. We are now more alert to harm than ever before. The Greeks approved of slavery and pederasty and the inferiority of women.
So, when Stan writes, "Dan and I both believe that morality and harm are interlinked. The difference is that Dan is absolutely certain that he has the ability and wisdom and far-reaching understanding to determine what constitutes harm, and I'm just not that good"....
Stan lies in one direction by putting words in your mouth about your certainty. And he fails faith in the other by taking the view that we cannot actually learn justice and become better, more sensitive to conscience.
Why and how does he do this?
When he writes, "I'm just not that good" - the bedrock principle of his Calvinism - he rejects god: "the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe." Stan is unwillingly confessing his atrophied conscience, his god blocking will. He has willfully numbed his conscience by walling off his consciousness between the leather covers of a book. Stan cannot observe god's work, cannot walk in god's ways. Stan cannot love god.
Which all results in Stan and Craig and Marshal and the fake bagpiper and all the goons being goons: in St. Paul's word, they are Judaizers. They impose one kind of cultural law on others to follow before they would bestow sanctification.
As the good book says: that ain't grace.
God's grace is simply god's life. And god lives by love.
Thank god we can recognize love by our own conscience, the life of our selves that pays attention to the movement of the Holy Spirit, which blows where it wills by love in love and for love. The law of the spirit is freedom and peace.
You are right, Dan, to defend the goodness of creation. The Bible tells us so.
"There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do: by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and to deal with sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, so that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace."
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