I ain't got no quarrel with them Vietcong

No, I am not going 10,000 miles to help murder, kill, and burn other people to simply help continue the domination of white slavemasters over dark people the world over. This is the day and age when such evil injustice must come to an end.
Image courtesy of Wiki.

More on Ali and the US opposition to War Opposers, including popular, black ones at a time when war was more popular than US citizens:

In 1964, Ali failed the U.S. Armed Forces qualifying test because his writing and spelling skills were sub-par. However, in early 1966, the tests were revised and Ali was reclassified as 1A.^[10] This classification meant he was now eligible for the draft and induction into the U.S. Army during a time when the United States was involved in the Vietnam War. When notified of this status, he declared that he would refuse to serve in the United States Army and publicly considered himself a conscientious objector.^[10] Ali stated: "War is against the teachings of the Holy Qur'an. I'm not trying to dodge the draft. We are not supposed to take part in no wars unless declared by Allah or The Messenger. We don't take part in Christian wars or wars of any unbelievers." He famously said in 1966: "I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Congs..."

Widespread protests against the Vietnam War had not yet begun, but with that one phrase, Ali articulated the reason to oppose the war for a generation of young Americans, and his words served as a touchstone for the racial and antiwar upheavals that would rock the 1960s. Ali's example inspired Martin Luther King, Jr. – who had been reluctant to alienate the Johnson Administration and its support of the civil rights agenda – to voice his own opposition to the war for the first time.^[62]

Rare for a heavyweight boxing champion in those days, Ali spoke at Howard University, where he gave his popular "Black Is Best" speech to 4,000 cheering students and community intellectuals after he was invited to speak by sociology professor Nathan Hare on behalf of the Black Power Committee, a student protest group.^[63][64]

Appearing shortly thereafter for his scheduled induction into the U.S. Armed Forces on April 28, 1967 in Houston, he refused three times to step forward at the call of his name. An officer warned him he was committing a felony punishable by five years in prison and a fine of $10,000. Once more, Ali refused to budge when his name was called. As a result, he was arrested and on the same day the New York State Athletic Commission suspended his boxing license and stripped him of his title. Other boxing commissions followed suit. Ali would not be able to obtain a license to box in any state for over three years.^[65]

At the trial on June 20, 1967, after only 21 minutes of deliberation, the jury found Ali guilty.^[10] After a Court of Appeals upheld the conviction, the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court. During this time, the public began turning against the war and support for Ali began to grow. Ali supported himself by speaking at colleges and universities across the country, where opposition to the war was especially strong. On June 28, 1971, the Supreme Court reversed his conviction for refusing induction by unanimous decision in Clay v. United States.^[10] The decision was not based on, nor did it address, the merits of Clay's/Ali's claims per se; rather, the government's failure to specify which claims were rejected and which were sustained, constituted the grounds upon which the Court reversed the conviction.^[66]

The Gods of Comfort vs the Prophets of Discombobulation

"But against any of the people of Israel, either man or beast, not a dog shall growl; that you may know that the Lord makes a distinction between the Egyptians and Israel."

Walter Brueggeman, on Moses, Egypt, impartiality as read through the lens of Exodus 11:7, quoted above:

[This declaration] occurs not in a doctrine but in a narrative and an uproven memory that we must let stand in all its audacity. It is not reflective theology but news just for this moment and just this community. The God who will decide is not the comfortable god of the empire, so fat and well fed as to be neutral and inattentive. Rather, it is the God who is alert to the realities, who does not flinch from taking sides, who sits in the divine council on the edge of his seat and is attentive his special interests. It is the way of the unifying gods of the empire not to take sides and, by being tolerant, to cast eternal votes for the way things are... 

There is not much here for the reasoned voices. No prophet ever sees things under the aspect of eternity. It is always partisan theology, always for the moment, always for the concrete community, satisfied only to see only a piece of it all and to speak out of that at the risk of contradicting the rest of it. Empires prefer reasoned voices who see it all, who understand both sides, and who regard polemics as unworthy of God and divisive of the public good. But what an energizing statement! In his passion and energy, Moses takes sides with the losers and powerless marginal people; he has not yet grown cynical with the "double speak" of imperial talk and so dares to speak before the data are in and dares to affront more subtle thinking... 

Seen at a distance, this bald statement is high theology. It is the gospel; God is for us. In an empire no god is for anyone... [T]he urging I make to those who would be prophets is that we not neglect to do our work about who god is and that we know our discernment of God is at the breaking points in human community.

It is not that the prophetic voice isn't looking for truth, but she will not be satisfied by the "There are two sides to every story" false equivalence. He is not placated when he sees injustice. The prophets leave the comfort and familiarity of home and hearth and even their own country to report and point and scream and jump up and down and shock the kings and queens with discomforting stories. The prophetess does not side with the people she was raised with, but with her new people. Her people are now the marginalized, the oppressed, the downtrodden, the hurt, the evicted, the suffering, the sick, the rounded up, the pushed out, the expatriats.

The gods and priests of the empire - of the markets, of consumption - in their "impartiality" are truly really partial. They prefer the way things they are. They do not like to be upset. They want all to remain as it has been and forever will be. They may change a few seats on the deck, but the boat remains in the same direction, the majority of those seated remain seated, barking out orders followed by men with bullhorns and whips, demanding extra sweat, extra steam, extra breath from the rowers and steam room workers.

These are the gods, and their priests, who do not concern themselves about the oppression. Because concerning themselves about such things in any significant manner means to upset the cart. And the cart cannot be upset. The order of things cannot change nor be brought down. They must, at all costs, remain. They do not hear the cry of the slaves, the sick, the outsiders and lepers.

But God and the prophets of God do. They hear, and they cry out to the pharaohs and demand to, "Let my people go!" And when they are not heeded, when Pharaoh and his gods do not relent but harden their hearts, the Almighty Bearer of Justice liberates them by overthrowing the carts, by flinging the chariots and their horses (and their industrial bombers and nuclear weapons) into the sea. It is the prophets' job to declare liberation and seek justice - and not to settle for the way things are. Because the way things are is not right, and the God of Justice seeks to make all right.

The Radicals

In South Lyon, we hold school on Martin Luther King Day so that we can academically and instructionally honor Dr. King and his work, as well as empower our students with his message and dream. We will take a school-wide approach that helps to demonstrate the importance of this remarkable man known as a heroic leader in the history of modern American liberalism and present him, as well as other events in the Civil Rights Movements, using a packet with various activities created by the social studies teachers.

A friend of mine posted this text from his local school bulletin on Monday. An explanation, from his local school board, not that they won't celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr's legacy, as they seem to emphasize here, but how they want to run the narrative of this day.

And I applaud them in one sense. Not for their honesty (they are _not_ honest about it), nor for their bravery, nor for their shrewdness. I applaud them because they sem to still understand what the state of Arizona understood in the late 80's, what Ron Paul and hosts of US law makers understood in the 70's and 80's.

What Stone Mountain understood in the sixties. What the FBI understood from the time he showed up on the scene.

That is: Martin Luther King was a radical whose ideas and message were and are dangerous to how America does business.

And I thank God for that.

He recognized that America is not the sweet land of liberty it had long promised it was - certainly not for all. He recognized that the United States was a nation at constant war with itself over its dual identities. On the one hand, we have the identity we purport to the world, that one that we love to think of ourselves as: The beaconing light upon a hill; The motherland and wellspring of democracy; the Land overflowing with milk, honey, and gold paved streets. In the other palm, squashed within the tight grip of the victors' histories, whitewashed Thanksgiving plays, scrubbed and sanitized media remembrances, are the ugly truths that the US has been and continues to be a nation built on genocide and slavery; that we've been more about competing powers than cooperating peoples.

King revolutionarily called us to cooperate by resisting against the powers. For that he was branded a radical, a Marxist, a Communist, an outsider, an agitator, a meddler. Some of those labels are misleading (Marxist), some blatantly false (outsider).

But that word "radical". Someone who tries to get to the root of the problem. It's always had some negative connotation, but particularly since the media and numbskull pundits have used it to identify terrorists (particularly of the Muslim variety... sigh), the word has lost its meaning.

A true radical desires a true revolution in values. A true radical is not satisfied with words or parliamentary procedures or minor changes that ultimately change back again. A true radical wants to see radical changes - even if she is realiatic enough to believe those radical changes will not come within her lifetime. (I have been to the mountaintop!) She says that slavery is not acceptable. Ever. For whatever reason. That genocide is a sin against humanity. That forced removal, criminalizing entire people groups, economic warfare, acts of militarisation on civilians, undering of natural resources, defending and apologizing for sexual assault, and other acts of rampant and brazen imperialism are plain unacceptable and not to be acquiesced.

The true radical is like a prophet: focused and unrelenting, her tongue is a fire set up in her bones that will. Not. Quit.

And she uses means to her ends. Usually, the means are secondary to the ends. They are thoughtful, usually. They are planned. Premeditated. Accomplishable. And, most of the time, nonviolent.

King took it a little further in the American conscience (not that he was alone or the first. He learned from the Quakers, for instance, as well as Gandhi and many others) to say that the means are inextricably linked to the ends.

And since King wanted to end the racist, classist, war-profiting hegemony to cease its hold on the rest of us, he should still be respected as a dangerous radical.

Not that that's the kind of lesson that South Lyon would teach its children. That would also be radical.
King,

Yes, I Is Angry, Bro - But I'm Not Envious

Variously, in my slacktivism endeavors, I'll be asked if I'm envious. Or bitter. Or hateful. Or angry.

The correct answer, of course, is: no, no, no, yes.

If you're not familiar with biblical language that I'm using here, allow me to elaborate.

There are various accounts of prophets in the Hebrew scriptures. Some were major, some minor, some poets.

And then there was Jonah. If you're like me, you remember Jonah as the guy who got swallowed by a whale (yes, he was pwnd).

All the prophets had words from God - messages of salvation, condemnation, warnings. The prophets had no choice but to speak the Hebrew God's words to the intended audience, whether doing so meant praise, death, or torture for the prophet, because God's words were "Shut up in my bones like fire."

They all had their messages and their particular model. Most of them were angry about injustice done to or by their people, the most famous case being Amos. As a result, most of the prophets were unpopular, viewed as grumpy, angry, crazed folk. No prophet was accepted in her or his casa, according to Jesus. Yet they felt no option but to deliver their messages, with their "tongues on fire."

Jonah was the exception. Jonah, an Israelite, was to send a message of deliverance and redemption to the Ninevites. Nineveh was the empire that ruled and subjugated Israel, and Jonah, being a proud Israelite, detested the captors.

When God told this prophet to love his enemies, he didn't turn the other cheek. He turned and fled.

So, a boat, a large storm, a straw match, an intentional man overboard, and three days in the belly of a fish later, Jonah finds himself back on the journey he despised in the first place.

In the Message translation of the third chapter of the book:

Next, God spoke to Jonah a second time: "Up on your feet and on your way to the big city of Nineveh! Preach to them. They're in a bad way and I can't ignore it any longer." This time Jonah started off straight for Nineveh, obeying God's orders to the letter. 

Nineveh was a big city, very big—it took three days to walk across it. 

Jonah entered the city, went one day's walk and preached, "In forty days Nineveh will be smashed." 

The people of Nineveh listened, and trusted God. They proclaimed a citywide fast and dressed in burlap to show their repentance. Everyone did it—rich and poor, famous and obscure, leaders and followers... 

God saw what they had done, that they had turned away from their evil lives. He did change his mind about them. What he said he would do to them he didn't do.

One day on a three day journey. And then Jonah stops.

Jonah's heart just wasn't in this message. He didn't want reconciliation or mercy or love. He wanted what he considered to be justice. But God didn't destroy the Ninevites...

I'll post the entirety of the final passage. There are too many lessons here to ignore, and I'd like to leave it open for meditation on a few of them. But notice here Jonah's combo pack of hatred, bitterness, and envy.

Jonah was furious. He lost his temper. He yelled at God, "God! I knew it—when I was back home, I knew this was going to happen! That's why I ran off to Tarshish! I knew you were sheer grace and mercy, not easily angered, rich in love, and ready at the drop of a hat to turn your plans of punishment into a program of forgiveness! "

God said, "What do you have to be angry about?" 

But Jonah just left. He went out of the city to the east and sat down in a sulk. He put together a makeshift shelter of leafy branches and sat there in the shade to see what would happen to the city. 

God arranged for a broad-leafed tree to spring up. It grew over Jonah to cool him off and get him out of his angry sulk. Jonah was pleased and enjoyed the shade. Life was looking up. 

But then God sent a worm. By dawn of the next day, the worm had bored into the shade tree and it withered away. The sun came up and God sent a hot, blistering wind from the east. The sun beat down on Jonah's head and he started to faint. He prayed to die: "I'm better off dead!" 

Then God said to Jonah, "What right do you have to get angry about this shade tree?"
Jonah said, "Plenty of right. It's made me angry enough to die!" 

God said, "What's this? How is it that you can change your feelings from pleasure to anger overnight about a mere shade tree that you did nothing to get? You neither planted nor watered it. It grew up one night and died the next night. So, why can't I likewise change what I feel about Nineveh from anger to pleasure, this big city of more than 120,000 childlike people who don't yet know right from wrong, to say nothing of all the innocent animals?"

Notice the line: What do you have to be angry about? The correct answer: Nothing. He should have rejoiced in the humility and salvation of the Ninevites.

Jonah had cultivated his anger over the injustice of the Ninevite empire and what they had done to his people into a growing and festering bitterness. And that bitterness had turned and collaborated with hatred of the personal - not philosophical - sort.

This is where the God and the messenger parted. God made it clear that he sought to give the Ninevites a chance to change their ways. Jonah in no way wanted that chance to occur, ran away, reluctantly and poorly and half-a33edly did his part, and then sat up a one-man theater, eager for the pyrotechnics. Wherein all the inhabitants of a major metropolis would be extinguished.

He was not looking forward to their salvation. But he was looking forward to their gruesome, fire-from-above death. He wanted God to conduct a War on Terror for his viewing pleasure.

And when that didn't transpire, Jonah sulked like a child who didn't receive his pony. This might've bothered God if God were a contemporary politician. Then maybe God would've decided to cave into the blood-lust demographic. But the Hebrew God was much more concerned about the lives of 120,000 uneducated folks then in appeasing the vengeance crowd.

Bloodthirsty Jonah was angry. Not because justice wasn't served. Jonah's idea of justice didn't equate with God's ideas of justice. Bloodthirsty Jonah was angry because mercy flowed like the mighty rivers.

And then Jonah got some reprieve from his subsiding hatred-and-bitterness anger. A vine gave him some nice shade from the brutal sun. And he enjoyed his material comforts and obviously felt entitled to them. Life was finally looking up for Ol' Jonah, huh?* He quite literally had it made in the shade.

So when the vine wilted, he was triply angry. This anger, though, was filled by bitterness, hatred, and envy now.

Envy, despite what the mouthpieces of the elites try to convince us, is when one wants what others have - but doesn't need - solely for himself and is consumed by it. Jonah had it all, and he wanted an extra step of mercy - to the point where he was further angered by it. Envy however, ISN'T wanting for all to have equally. That would be JUSTICE.

The mouthpieces of the Triple Angry Crowd are awfully confused about what is right and what is evil here.

It is evil to be selfish. It is the work of evil that allows envy and greed and bitterness and wrath to consume us. And that is something that every person needs to be vigilant against (ftr, much of the American left is filled with righteous indignation that sometimes becomes bitterness).

So, yes, I'm angry. There are many other emotions that I tap into, but I can't help but look at the injustice in the world and be a bit troubled, a bit angry at the least. I try to watch, though, so I don't allow that anger to burn over and smother and incapacitate love. It's important to see humanity in every person, but there are going to be times when that's just a simplistic answer for a hurting people.

The trick, I think, is not to let righteous anger turn into a Jonah.

----------------------------------
*

The Prophetic Imagination and a Time Like This

Prophetic.

That word means so much and yet so little to so many. I grew up in an environment that largely talks about prophecy as being fortune-telling about the End Times - except where it somehow or another points to Jesus. Now I'm more apt to align myself with a movement that largely equates prophecy with speaking harsh truths to the powerful. However, in my denomination and in some other charismatic churches, we tend to use the word to mean highly individualized, personal words of God to people within the church - usually words of encouragement, but words that are highly symbolic, spiritual, and yet real and tangible as well.

And then a gander at the Hebrew Scriptures leaves us with something altogether different itself: The actual prophets. Men who lived with and fell in love with whores. Who despised their captors and wanted to see them burn. Who dared kings and queens to their faces. Who mocked foreign gods. Who were killed by the hundreds. Who prayed for bears. Who demanded justice for the poor from the merchants and nobility. Whose tongues burned with the fire of the word of the Lord.

These men (and women) were enigmatic. But they said God's near-impossible truths because they seemed to have no option but to do so. Some of them (Micah) were fueled by righteous indignation right out of the gate due to their state or circumstance in life. Yet others (Jonah) burned with self-righteous bitterness to the end of their story - although probably not without some justification.

Wanting to know more about prophecy and how relevant it is to this day and age, I've turned to a couple scholars - men of courage who've made it their life's ambition to speak the prophetic into current times and against the current. One of those was a hero himself to Martin Luther King, Jr.: Rabbi Abraham Heschel. I've written about him extensively here before. Another one is revered Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann (incidentally, my old friend Carson Clark is also writing about him on his blog and makes note that WB is nearly single-handedly responsible for invigorating his love for the Old Testament. That is no small feat for nearly ANY Christian...)

The following are a couple paragraphs from Brueggemann's primal work, "The Prophetic Imagination"

The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the conciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us... Prophetic ministry has to do not with primarily with addressing specific public crises but with adressing, in season and out of season, the dominant crisis that is enduring and resilient, of having our alternative vocation co-opted and domesticated. It may be, of course, that this enduring crisis manifests itself in any given time around concrete issues, but it concerns the enduring crisis that runs from concrete issue to concrete issue. That point is particularly important to ad hoc liberals who run from issue to issue witout discerning the enduring domesticaton of vision in all of them.

The alternative conciousness to be nurtured, on the one hand, serves to criticize in dismantling the dominant consciousness. To that extent, it attempts to do what the liberal tendency has done: engage in a rejection and delegitimizing of the present ordering of things. On the other hand, that alternative consciousness to be nurtured serves to energize persons and communities by its promise of another time and situation toward which the community of faith may move.

I can't help but notice that this is always relevant, but that perhaps now a good portion of society is ready to hear it. Even as the Powers of the Air are as ready as ever to drown out the prophetic imagination with their own temptations, noises, images, it is the time for the Church to get prophetic.

The Christian church, I am convinced, is at a crossroads - no different really than a million other crossroads put before her in her its history. She can acknowledge her historical and present short-comings and be a counter-cultural agent, voice and visionary for change. Or she can continue to be co-opted and disempowered by the Powers of the Air and continue their religious but ultimately dead languages. Not that the songs, the rituals, the prayers are bereft of meaning or life, but that they aren't. They are very much alive but serve within a holistic purpose. "For if we have the tongues of angels but refuse to love..."

We have, sadly, the gift of healing but we do nothing with it but advertise it. And when the people show up for wellness, we put on a dog and pony show and wonder where the people go.

Maybe what they need is to hear the voice of God rushing through the people of God, in all its bizarre and devestating - and freeing - manifestations.

These children that you spit on As they try to change their worlds...

There are always going to be conservatives - those who, by definition, believe that society is working just fine, that we should not struggle so hard for new things. New developments, they argue, may be at odds with the natural and right order of the world*, or they may be good things that will come about in their due time if we only wait for the good timing of the good people running the town.

Of course nothing is perfect, they reassure us. So when we replace one system, we'll just get another imperfect one to replace it and we'll have to ask, why oh why did we ever waste so much time and energy? Because, rest assured, that system will be just as bad as - if not worse than - the one that it replaced.

It is understandable that the rich and powerful beat this drum. It is their livelihood that is in danger if the world were to turn upside down and every person demanded what was theirs to have. The only reason it's unsurprising that women and minorities and working class white males add their gongs and timpanies and harps and bongos and shakers and tom-toms and djembes and horns and keys and cymbals and whistles and chimes and congas to the deafening cacophony is because history has shown this to be the case time and again. The house slave is elevated above the field slave for the master's own manipulative purposes. The white sharecroppers often side with the white shareholders, not just because of their shared skin color (which is a component), but also because they are afraid of losing what little they have, not to mention losing the remote possibility that they may one day be rewarded for playing according to the rules and see a plentiful harvest in their days.

It all reminds me of teaching in the public schools. I wasn't the best. I wasn't anywhere near what I wanted to be as a classroom manager. A few managed to do all right, though. Some of my colleagues managed to excel. But at a great price. The odds were stacked against our students and they knew it. Whereas white kids in the burbs had a pretty good idea of the options in front of them, most of our Latino and African American students did not see a correlation between what we were offering in the classroom and what few options the world offered them after they left campus - whether for the day or for good.

Largely as a result of this disconnect, I think, and as a growing disconnect between the black young male and his environment (wherein many of the older would-be role models are incarcerated) male black students almost routinely envision themselves as pro-basketball stars. Against impossible odds, this is where they hope to be. The ONLY place they can see themselves. The very system comprised of systemically isolated and ostracized individuals within larger, but forcibly broken communities - made of impoverished youth and women, imprisoned and blackballed men, and a tiny sliver of very wealthy athletes playing for even wealthier white men - this system should not be questioned because it means the end of an impossible dream.

This dream will only be realized for 1 out of every 1,000 of those who are enthralled in it. For the other 99.9%, they are simply victims in its horrible wake.

As odd as it may be for the police state apologists to recognize thus, however, they are in a similar, fantastic and fatalistic predicament.

-------------------------------------
*c.f., Slavery, Apartheid, Jim Crow, the need for universal health care

Some trust in chariots, some worship power...

From the first chapter of Abraham Joshua Heschel's phenomenal book, The Prophets:

Those who have a sense of beauty know that a stone sculpted by an artist's poetic hands has an air of loveliness; that a beam charmingly placed utters a song. The prophet's ear, however, is attuned to a cry imperceptible to others. A clean house or a city architecturally distinguished may yet fill the prophet with distress.

‘What sorrow awaits you thieves!...
What sorrow awaits you who build big houses
with money gained dishonestly!...
The very stones in the walls cry out against you,
and the beams in the ceilings echo the complaint.
What sorrow awaits you who build cities
with money gained through murder and corruption!'

Habakkuk 2:6,9, 11-12 (nlt)

These words contradict most men's conceptions: the builders of the great cities have always been envied and acclaimed; neither violence nor exploitation could ever dim the sound of their praise. "Woe to him..."? Human justice will not exact its due, nor will the pangs of conscience disturb intoxication with success, for deep in our hearts is the temptation to worship the imposing, the illustrious, the ostentatious. Had a poet come to Samaria, the capital of the Northern Kingdom, he would have written songs exalting its magnificent edifices, its beautiful temples and worldly monuments. But when Amos of Tamera came to Samaria, he spoke not of the magnificence of palaces, but of moral confusion and oppression. Dismay filled the prophet:

I abhor the pride of Jacob,

And hate his palaces,

he cried out in the name of the Lord (Amos 6:8). Was Amos then, not sensitive to beauty?

What, then, is the highest good? Three things ancient society cherished above all else: wisdom, wealth, and might. To the prophets, such infatuation was ludicrous and idolatrous. Assyria would be punished for her arrogant boasting... [Isaiah 10:13; Isaiah 29:13, 14; Jeremiah 8:9]

Ephraim has said,

Ah, but I am rich,

I have gained wealth for myself;

But all his riches can never offset

the guilt he has incurred...

Because you have trusted in your chariots

and the multitude of your warriors,

Therefore the tumult of war shall arise among your people,

And all your fortresses shall be destroyed.

Hosea 12:8; 10:13,14

This is what the Lord says:
“Don’t let the wise boast in their wisdom,
or the powerful boast in their power,
or the rich boast in their riches.
But those who wish to boast
should boast in this alone:
that they truly know me and understand that I am the Lord
who demonstrates unfailing love
and who brings justice and righteousness to the earth,
and that I delight in these things.
I, the Lord have spoken!

Jeremiah 9:23-24 (nlt)

This message was expressed with with astounding finality by a later prophet: "This is the word of the Lord... Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit..." (Zechariah 4:6)

Make of that what you will, but I hardly think that's a ringing endorsement of the US as it stands. Less of American Exceptionalism. Idols should never take the place of worshiping God and serving our neighbors.