Fascism
Our Dangerous Drift Toward A 1-Party System
The Republicans are using the very liberties we espouse to foment a political monolith which advocates the suppression of free speech and independent thought in America. These men are, in fact, crafting a one-party, one-thought, one-idea system, where what we think and what we believe are dictated to us in daily talking points emailed from Washington. White conservative Christians, thirsting for “family values” and looking for the government to define them, have been bought lock, stock and Bibles by Karl Rove and his buddies. And that’s how the GOP stays in power: getting its message—line for line—to come out of the mouths of soccer moms; the admirable efficiency of the finely-tuned Republican machine often resonating with the rumble of tanks moving on Poland. The Black church simply must choose to become relevant again.
On
August 11, 1984
President Ronald Reagan uttered what is now a famous but
humorous gaffe prior to his weekly radio address. “My fellow
Americans,” he said, not realizing his microphone was on, “I'm
pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will
outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” I
didn't agree with his politics, and I thought his rhetoric was
dangerous, I thought Nancy ran the country for eight years, and
that he enjoyed being the actor reading off cue cards more than
he did being the leader of the free world. But, on some level, I
indeed admired him, if for no other reason than that he actually
did believe in something and wasn't afraid to put those beliefs
to the test. When terrorists blew up a Marines barracks in
Lebanon, Reagan stood up and took the hit, refusing to lay off
blame on the commanding officers. When the Iran-Contra scandal
broke, Reagan chose not to cover it up, not to duck
responsibility. He went on live TV and just took the hit. “If
there is to be blame,” he said, “it properly rests here in this
office and with this president. And I accept responsibility for
the bad as well as the good.” An iconic figure, Reagan has been
the template the Republican party has tried to replicate for
many decades. President Bush has similarly been draped in
Caesar's robes, but Bush, constantly denying responsibility and
stubbornly sticking to tragically flawed polices while laying
off blame everywhere he can, fails the character test. Efforts
to paint Bush with the same brush as Reagan notwithstanding, I
believe Reagan would have despised Dubya. He would have hated
having his name mentioned in the same breath.
Reagan was the Anti-Nixon, the tortured, embittered and
secretive self-loathing genius. Nixon was infinitely smarter and
wiser than Reagan, but was crippled by deep emotional
scars—insecurity and inadequacy—that drove him to ever
increasing levels of risk and illegality. Consequently, George
H.W. Bush, Reagan’s Vice President and successor, was the
Anti-Reagan. While faithful to his president, George Bush
clearly espoused radically different views on governing, at one
point calling Reagan’s economic ideas “voodoo economics.” Nobody
believed Bush’s political reversals once he joined Reagan’s
ticket in a cosmetic effort to unify the party, and when Bush
became president himself, he vastly disappointed America by not
being the jolly Styrofoam cowboy Reagan had been. Rather, Bush
was saddled with the dread consequences of Reagan’s affable
disaffection with most facts. Reagan’s supply-side economics
theory, the “voodoo” Bush had warned about a decade before, had
created an unsustainable and false national prosperity. Reagan’s
affable nature, his kind Uncle Fluffy-meets-John Wayne
pre-packaging, was an easy sell to the American public. Bush, by
contrast, was much more of an actual person. A president left
with a real mess by Uncle Fluffy.
America punished Bush, whose ingenious and surgical prosecution
of a Mideast war—one that could have left America economically
crippled and politically despised—should have won him a Nobel.
Bush’s patient and steadfast ejection of Saddam Hussein from
Kuwait was a historic mix of diplomacy and military options,
gathering some 34 countries into a powerful coalition that
denied Hussein the kind of aggression that has historically led
to global conflict. And he brought the troops him within a few
short months.
But Bush’s 92 percent post-war approval rating couldn’t help him
as the economy continued to crumble around him. Admitting the
truth—that Bush was, essentially, paying the tab for Reagan’s
voodoo economics—would have been politically disastrous. Reagan
was, and remains to this day, a Republican demigod. Any attempts
to put his presidency into real economic and political context
are summarily resisted. Unable to defend himself from the charge
of not being Ronald Reagan, enough of Bush’s conservative
support split that a virtually unknown womanizing southern
governor took the White House from him, an ignoble and bitter
defeat for the last truly mature man to sit in the Oval office.
Bill Clinton’s presidency was a study of extremes. He presided
over the greatest peacetime economic expansion since World War
II. But he disgraced the office by cheating on his wife and then
by lying to Congress about it. Telling the truth about his
sexual contact with an intern would have been hurtful,
embarrassing, and costly (Clinton was being sued by another
woman he’d allegedly harassed, and denied such behavior in a
deposition), but there would have been little if any legal
consequences to it. By lying, Clinton gave the
Republican-controlled Congress what it desperately wanted: a way
to embarrass him and ruin his legacy by impeaching him.
Impeaching the sitting president is an act reserved for high
crimes and misdemeanors. Clinton’s lying under oath certainly
fit the misdemeanor description, but it was a real stretch.
Anyone who had any sense of what was going on knew the
impeachment was an abuse of power, using judicial process to
accomplish a political goal. The Republicans used this tawdry
business of Clinton's to accomplish what they couldn't do at the
polls: destroy his presidency. And, astonishingly, the American
public just sat back and watched them do it.
This marked the beginning of the new, darker and more ruthless
Republican party. It is perhaps ironic to think that Clinton,
our greatly flawed yet greatly beloved two-term Democrat,
actually helped galvanize the Republican party. Their
desperation to bring Clinton down, their bare knuckle abuse of
power and their ability to browbeat Democrats into spineless
sissies who actually stood with the Republicans like they were
their friends, gave rise to the New Breed Republican. Having
tasted blood, having abused their power and gotten away with it,
having browbeaten the Democrats into sissies, a new, more
ruthless, united front evolved. A beast that would steal two
elections before systematically stripping American citizens of
their rights and becoming the greatest single threat to American
democracy in history.
Republican chest-beating about the rightness of the Clinton
impeachment need look only to the present administration.
Clinton lied about sexual contact with a college student.
President George W. Bush lied about many, many things, not the
least of which was our reasons for invading Iraq.
There now exist facts that tell us our president knowing lied to
us, and deliberately sidestepped and short-changed diplomatic
efforts in order to get the troops into Iraq within a
predetermined operational window. This was a complete rush to
war, a war the president had hoped to prosecute as nobly and
cleanly as his father. But his own father warned against going
into Bagdad and toppling the regime there, “If the international
coalition that fought together in Desert Storm had exceeded the
U.N. mandate ... if the United States had gone on its own into
Baghdad, after Saddam and his forces had surrendered and agreed
to disarm. The coalition would have instantly shattered and the
political capital that we had gained as a result of our
principled restraint ... would have been lost.”
Clinton’s lie cost him our respect. Bush’s lies cost, at this
writing 2,307 American lives and a conservative estimate of
18,000 war wounded—lost limbs, eyes, hands. 33,489 estimated
Iraqi civilians dead. All of it due to Bush’s obsession with
Saddam Hussein and his advisors’ obsession with reshaping the
Middle East into Western-style democracies (and making billions
off of the oil in the process). Bush has spent $246 billion (at
this writing) on the Iraq effort, which could have paid for 32
million children to attend a year of Head Start, bought 11
million students four-year college scholarships or built two
million additional public housing units. All that money and all
of those live lost, but there is no talk, none, about impeaching
Bush. Or even censuring him for misleading the country to war.
Meanwhile, the Democratic party has, seemingly, fallen into the
hands of dilettantes. There seem to be no deep thinkers, no
brilliant minds, within the Democratic party. The Republicans
have the brilliant Karl Rove, who masterminded dozens of
brilliant sales campaigns and political maneuvers designed to
make Bush’s bankrupt policies palatable to the American public
and to hide the fact this is, hands down, the worst president in
modern history. The fact that it has taken six years for major
political voices to begin echoing that statement is a testament
to Rove’s sheer brilliance and power. He is an amazing man and
implacable strategist who has cleverly masked the emperor’s
nudity for quite some time now.
It’s possible that, now faced with political challenges of his
own, Rove’s distraction is central to the president’s spiraling
popularity. An independent investigation into who leaked the
identity of a CIA operative continues to eat towards the Vice
President—who has tossed his chief of staff Lewis “Scooter”
Libby under the wheels of the bus—but the true target of the
investigation seems obviously to be Karl Rove. But, Rove is the
Darth Vader of political warfare. You don’t even mention his
name unless you’ve got the firepower to take him on. So the
investigators are going at Rove in an oblique fashion, targeting
(obviously) the Vice President. But the goal is Rove. Because,
once they get Rove, they get Bush.
The real problem in America isn’t the Republicans, though. It’s
the Democrats. The country was founded on a two-party system to
protect us from suffering under a fascist dictatorship. The
political process is supposed to be adversarial, by which means
all views are represented and power is shared. But power really
isn’t being shared. The Republicans are simply running the
tables because the Democrats are horribly disorganized and
ununified. Almost by definition, Republicans stick together.
They are, at the end of the day, soulless liars who parrot the
party line, no matter how transparently ridiculous it is. They
behave a lot like communists in that the good of the party is
more important than individualism or individual ideas, and they
turn against their own who stray from the exacting standards of
their political agenda.
Democrats, on the other hand, embrace free thought. Which is why
there is less focus and less unity, as Democrats encourage a
plurality of voices and ideas—principles this country was
founded upon, but lousy political strategy. The Democrats have
no voice. Have no agenda. They complain about the war but offer
no real solutions or alternatives. Instead, they just wait for a
political opening—selling port rights to the United Arab
Emirates—only to find themselves cut off at the knees when Bush
orchestrates a back-door recusal by the UAE. The Democrats are
now sputtering on the Sunday shows with nothing but whiny
complaints about a deal that’s been done away with with a
minimum of political spoils for them.
The Republican threat of the hour is Senator John McCain, a
likeable moderate and war hero with a great record. He is the
political front runner and presumptive nominee, which is
precisely why the Republicans must now eat him. Over the next
year or so, the Republicans will draw McCain in closer,
embracing him as a brother, and perhaps anointing him as Vice
President when Dick Cheney conveniently steps down sometime next
year (which, I guarantee, he will). This is a trap for McCain,
who is the GOP’s worst nightmare: an independent thinker with
political clout. They desperately need him to stay down on the
farm in order for them to get Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist
or perhaps even Florida Governor Jeb Bush elected, but they
definitely don’t want McCain even delivering pizzas to the Oval
office because McCain will not be led around by his nose the way
Bush has been.
The smart money, now, is on the GOP nominating McCain and
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. This would be a killer
ticket and virtually impossible to beat, as it would suck the
wind out of the seemingly inevitable Democratic Party nomination
of New York Senator Hillary Clinton.
Huge political scandals have broken out, and now the White House
and congressional spin masters are up to their ears patching up
the leaky ship of state, delaying the trial of lobbyist Jack
Abramoff—accused of massive and extensive bribery of Republican
elected officials—until after the 2006 midterm elections. The
FEMA tapes, released last week, revealed the president was, in
fact, warned that the New Orleans levee system could possibly
collapse, which exposed the president’s consistent denials that
anyone could have foreseen the disaster as lies. The
administration’s Boogie Man scare tactics—essentially painting
all Muslims and Arabs as terrorists—backfired on the president
in a major way, torpedoing a routine deal to have an Arab-owned
company manage several ports in the U.S.—a deal even President
Clinton said, recently, posed no threat to U.S. national
security. But the White House has spent five years managing—note
that word, managing—the terror threat: keeping us just scared
enough to re-elect the president and to keep our attention off
of the emerging revelations of the president’s incompetence and
the vast corruption both in his administration and in Congress.
There is, indeed, a lot for the Republican party to overcome
between now and 2008, but they do have one thing going for them:
there is, virtually, no Democratic party. The Democratic party
is made up of largely People Who Are Not Republicans. That’s not
the same thing as being a unified party that has actual ideas.
They have no ideas. Hillary is their best idea at the moment,
and she’s a terrible idea in that her Ice Queen persona fairly
energizes the GOP faithful, and that she doesn’t have the
political savvy to know when to keep her mouth shut. All Hillary
had to do at Coretta Scott King's funeral was nod her head,
smile, wave and sit down—she’d be half a dozen points up in the
polls. Instead, her ego allowed her to follow Bill
Clinton—something not even the sitting president wants to do—and
she hurt herself, seriously, among her strongest and most loyal
base—African Americans—who discovered, in a shocking moment of
clarity, that Hillary is, in fact, not Bill.
Which isn’t to say we won’t vote for her, I’m sure many of us
will vote for whoever the Democrats nominate, but, black
America, statistically, does not watch the news. Many of us,
however, watched the King funeral. Many of us have never heard
Mrs. Clinton speak before the king funeral. She shouldn’t have
spoken. Once she received the Rock Star anointing of the
crowd—an extended standing ovation once someone shouted out,
“Our next president!” —she should have sat down. There was
nowhere to go from there, no political upside to her actually
speaking. If the applause level after she spoke was less than
the extended roaring standing ovation before she spoke, that
would hang around her neck. If her speech was not highlighted
during the evening news, that would land a telling blow to her
stature. Both things were true. The applause after her remarks
was nowhere near the riot that proceeded it, and most news
broadcasts clipped Hillary's remarks as, well, unremarkable. She
blew it. It was a politically arrogant thing to do, to expose
how ordinary you are.
And it exposes a bigger problem: the political indifference of
African Americans. Mind you, white America is just as
indifferent, but in a different way. The red state-blue state
thing has become so entrenched, our loyalties so tragically
polarized, that, in large measure, people who think of
themselves as Republicans are used to being told what to do and
what to think. Meanwhile, people who identify themselves are
Democrats tend to squabble among one another. That’s what makes
the Republican party so hard to beat: they are a legion of
lemmings; talking heads who, one after the other, say virtually
the same thing. Flag-waving soccer moms talking about Bush’s
“war on terror,” who actually believe operations in Iraq will
actually protect us from being hit, 911-style, again.
The war in Iraq has absolutely, positively, no bearing on the
networks that created the 9/11 attacks, other than that the war
has provided them with millions of fresh recruits; homeless
Iraqi orphans who will grow up hating us and waiting for a
chance for revenge. The president has created millions more bin
Ladens, millions more terrorists-in-training, by prosecuting his
clumsy and unnecessary aggression against a state with no
material connection to the 9/11 terrorists. He has spent, at
this writing, $246 billion on the war, with no end in sight,
while bin Laden remains at large.
It is disturbing and sad for me to see my local news anchors,
here, parroting the GOP party line, referring to the Iraq war as
the “war on terror” as though that were so, and coloring their
flag-waving, antiseptic presentation of the war to this town of
military families. They, and news affiliates like them all over
the country, are simply extensions of the president’s propaganda
machine. It is simply journalism at its worst. And that’s how
the GOP stays in power: getting its message—line for line—to
come out of the mouths of soccer moms. It’s like an invasion of
Pod People, to hear Ma and Pa America speaking lines written by
Karl Rove. They remind me of children taught to believe in Santa
Claus and the Tooth Fairy. They don’t read. They don’t inquire.
They just do what they’re told. By the news anchors, the
politicians. By their pastors.
The most frightening thing about these day and times is the
emerging single-party system and how we seem powerless or at
least unwilling to stand against it. I believe the way the
Republican party has done business these past years has been in
direct contravention to the spirit of the U.S. constitution,
falling just short of fascism as the Republican party programs
soccer moms and uses our own freedoms against us, most
notoriously with the president's exploitation of the 9/11
attacks for his own partisan political goals. Republican
meddling in key judicial decisions prompted former Supreme Court
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor to warn that acceptance of such
practice can give rise to an emerging “dictatorship” here in
America, warning, “...we should avoid those ends by avoiding
those beginnings.” Congress just renewed the dangerous and
controversial Patriot Act which grants the president sweeping
powers he'd not have if not for the looming (and, to some extent
manufactured) terrorist threat. Under this Act, the president
can designate anyone he chooses as an enemy combatant and then
jail that person for an indeterminate length of time without
charge or legal representation. For five years now, the
president has run a secret domestic surveillance program, where
he can install wiretaps without warrants and the administration
has sued Google to force the giant search engine to turn over
records of searches we've done, so the government can further
look into our reading and viewing habits, financial transactions
and personal correspondence.
These men are, in fact, exploiting these wartime powers to fuel
a political machine, a one-party, one-thought, one-idea system.
Challenges to the party line are not to be tolerated.
Flourishing, as the National Socialist German Workers Party once
did, in an open society, these men are ripping us off in broad
daylight. Hiding nothing, they are systematically deconstructing
the Constitution before our very eyes.
Black America seems to pretend all of this isn't about us. It's
about somebody else. It's about White Folk. Any black person who
doesn't understand the Pod People Rush Limbaugh co-opting of
white America is a direct threat to our most basic liberties is
ignorant beyond conception. The conservative climate in America
is all about “family values,” which is code for “white family
values.” It's all a yearning for Leave It To Beaver and Father
Knows Best and the days when black people were neither seen nor
heard.
Liberals Versus Conservatives
The rubbery, double-chinned, arrogant conservatives truly
frighten me in their simple-ness, their ignorant parroting of
the GOP party line. By any reasonably objective standard, most
any debate between a conservative and a moderate or liberal will
find the cogent argument, the more intellectual and logical
argument, on the liberal side, while the conservatives tend to
repeat practiced talking points and choose emotion over
intellect. Even faced with irrefutable facts, conservatives will
tow the party line, no matter how patently ridiculous the claim
or how patently obvious the lie. They're in it up to their
eyeballs and there's just no talking them down.
Liberals, by contrast, rarely enjoy the unity and uniformity
that makes the conservatives such a palpable threat. Liberals do
not wish to offend, do not wish to exclude. Conservatives, by
their very nature, exclude anyone and anything that hasn't been
cleared by Central Command. Liberals make room for a mosaic of
voices and ideas. Conservatives know only one absolute
truth—theirs. They make absolutely no allowance for the
possibility that their are any number of rights and any number
of wrongs. Conservatives see hard edges and hard truths. Yes and
no. Liberals see Maybe.
By continuing to outfight and outsmart the Democrats and
liberals, the conservatives will continue to snowball their
movement until the country becomes, in effect, one party—the
GOP. And what we say, what we think, will be issued from
Washington in daily GOP talking points, while dissenting views
will be presented, if at all, as extremist and negligible.
Which, by definition, is fascism.
Ironically, the only real way to take on the Republican monolith
is for the Democrats or some third party to become a monolith in
and of itself. Which is to say, the fascist tactics, the mind
control, the rigid message control, the intolerance practiced
with military fervor by the well-oiled GOP machine must me met,
head on, with a machine of equal might. In other words, we’d
have to begin practicing a form of fascism ourselves, policing
our own message and rigidly maintaining our focus.
Which means we lose, anyway. We lose our plurality. We lose our
diversity. We lose everything that is unique and wonderful about
us. In order to slay the dragon, we become a dragon ourselves;
matching cynicism for cynicism and hardening into the very thing
we’ve united against.
All of which exposes the severe problem with the American ideal.
In these days of fast-food news and information, evil men (and
women) will use the very liberties we espouse to foment a
monolithic agenda that the goes on to silence diverse voices and
suppress the very liberties that allowed their agenda in the
first place. It’s been said that power corrupts and absolute
power corrupts absolutely. It is likely that men in power will
stop at nothing to retain that power—even compromising the very
principles the nations was founded upon. The saddest and most
tragic bi-product of Karl Rove’s brilliance is the suppression
of free speech and independent thought in America, the admirable
efficiency of the finely-tuned Republican machine often
resonates with the rumble of tanks moving on Poland.
Democrats Versus Republicans
Sadly, the vast majority of us Church Folk are just unconcerned.
We’ve got the Word Network on all day, watching one phony after
another using God to line their pockets, before heading off to
church where we do nothing, noting, but repeat ourselves week
after week, and where Karl Rove’s name has, likely, never been
mentioned. Which is, precisely, what the Republican party is
counting on. They fully understand our rights under the
constitution to be lazy and uniformed. While the Democrats play
towards our nation’s ideals, the Republicans understand the true
nature of the American people and play towards that nature. The
Democrats always try and sell us hope. The Republicans always
succeed by selling us fear. The Democrats think conceptually.
The Republicans think practically and cynically. The Democrats
want us to think for ourselves. The Republicans know that’s too
much work, so they issue out talking points, telling us what we
should think. And those talking points seem to be dictated by
corporate interest groups, to whom the Republicans regularly and
baldly sell out our national interests.
It's interesting to note that Reagan's 1984 Republicans enjoyed
a laugh about bombing the Soviet Union. Bush's 2006 Republicans
actually want to do it. Reagan's 1984 Republicans were freshly
bruised from Vietnam and Watergate and those terrible lessons
learned. Bush's 2006 Republicans are war hawks anxious to define
American policy at the end of a gun. Reagan's 1984 Republicans
brought down the Soviet Union. Bush's 2006 Republicans used the
cover of an American tragedy to invade a sovereign country that
has never attacked us in naive hope of (1) avenging Bush's
daddy, (2) installing a western-style democracy, and (3)
snatching the oil—and thus reducing our dependence on Saudi
Arabia. It astonishes me how simple-minded and ridiculous Bush
and his advisors were to actually think any of those three
objectives could be reached, and, even more astonishing that
they never imagined the quagmire they now find themselves stuck
in, with, even more astonishingly, no exit strategy in sight.
Reagan's 1984 Republicans are the older, wiser ghosts of Vietnam
and Watergate Bush's 2006 Republicans arrogantly dismiss as over
the hill and irrelevant, only to now find themselves embroiled
in their own Vietnam and their own Watergate.
The common denominator between the eras is the clueless
president. The difference being Reagan had Nancy and Ed Meese.
Laura Bush seems very nice but I have doubts she advises the
president in any material way, and Bush seems to wave off most
any substantive advice his father has, while he's surrounded
himself with politically greedy sycophants who already have
their eye on Teheran. Much as we'd like to think of Reagan as
the daffy buffoon, remember the Berlin Wall did come down
largely as a result of his efforts. Name me one substantial
positive or effective foreign policy objective President Bush
has achieved in his six years in office.
Our secret weapon, of course, is the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit is like a spiritual Geiger counter that leads us
towards truth and away from lies and danger. Most of us fall
into diverse temptations and difficulties in our lives because
we don’t involve God in our decisions. Oh, big ones, maybe, like
a move or buying a house or something. But how many of us
consult with God while we’re brushing our teeth? While we’re
planning our day? Where would You like me to go today, Lord?
What can I do for you today, Lord? How many of us pray to God to
reveal truth to us? We pray for stuff. Please Give Me More
Stuff. I don’t want more stuff. I want more wisdom. I want more
truth.
If we would just stay in tune with the Holy Spirit, we would
learn to recognize His voice when He is speaking. We would be
more in touch with our instincts, with our conscience. Frankly,
we’d cuss a lot less. We’d be a lot more patient with each
other. And we wouldn’t embrace political messages we know for a
fact are simply untrue. We'd have the wisdom to know when we
were being lied to and the courage to do something about it. We
wouldn't just sit there, Sunday morning, and ingest whatever
talking points were emailed from Washington the night before to
pastors who've been brainwashed and bought off.
Through Christ, we can put a stop to this. Through Him, we can
protect ourselves and safeguard our future by protecting the
very liberty the majority party is wire-tapping and locking
away. They're not even hiding it; the pernicious and capricious
repression of free thought, free speech and free enterprise is
happening very publicly, the news blared from headlines and TV
screens. But we could care less. we're unmotivated, uninformed,
lazy. Our pastors are unmotivated, uniformed and lazy. Our
churches are impotent self-parodies of the great and powerful
institutions that once brought these powerful leaders to their
knees and forced change in this country. Now, we are safely and
routinely ignored.
The only people who can do anything about this is us. The only
people who can put a stop to this is us. Me, you, them. But,
first, we have to care enough to turn off the WB and BET and
start reading, yes, reading. Reading, learning, growing. Asking
the tough questions. Demanding the tough answers. Voting—not
just our party lines but voting smartly and demanding results
from our elected leaders or voting them out when we don't get
them.
All of which requires a fundamental paradigm shift in Black
America from a culture of observers to an activist culture. In
other words, getting up off of the sofa. demanding more from our
leaders, starting with the pastor. The church shouldn't be a
perpetual re-run—the same circus every week, the same
foolishness, the same gossip. But not one word about Dubai Ports
World or the genocide underway in Darfur. We are so very much
like children, accepting whatever our parents tell us as truth,
completely uninterested in world events and having not much
sense of our own responsibility to shape them. This is
especially tragic in the context of the people who suffered and
died in order that we could have the rights we are now casually
allowing to be stripped from us. It's just as if we were all
being publicly lynched, and none of us seem disturbed enough
about it to even get off the sofa.
We can do better. We can put a stop to this. But we've got to
find our voice. we've got to find our will. All of which begins
at home and, most especially, at the church. The black church
simply must choose to become relevant again. If we tapped into
even a fraction of the power we, as Christians, as join heirs in
Christ, have, we could derail this seemingly unstoppable force.
We could ensure America remains a place where every voice is
heard, where every dream can be realized.
Until we do, we'll continue to see our rights diminished and our
voices silenced by people who are smart enough to know how lazy
and dumb we are. All we need do to prove them right is nothing
at all. Pick up the remote, turn on the WB. Giggle at Mo'Nique.
while our brothers and sisters are summarily hanged in the
street.
Christopher J. Priest
13 March 2006
editor@praisenet.org
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