Where 4 Art Thou?

2009-05-08T21:51:12-04:00

Can you imagine speaking in such a stilted language your entire life? I've always made a connection between the energy of a language and the overall vibrance of the people speaking that language.

When I think back on the Shakespearean writings and similar writings of that era, I get this gnawing tension in my backside that makes me want to just squeeze my buttocks together. I define that feeling as being tight-assed. I also imagine men running around in makeup, wigs and form-fitting pants reminiscent of pantyhose, and I feel, well, just a little stiff. Those must have been the true nut-huggers of the day. ;-)

So, did I come back on the scene just to share that bit of imagination? Of course, I did. But most importantly, I came back to let a few folks know that I'm still around. I also had to put it out there that a lot has changed about me, change I'm all for because it's part of my evolvement process.

I sincerely hope that the now-minute audience I have is undergoing its own evolvement. That you're not standing still, waiting for something to place your potential energy into motion. That you don't need an outside force to act upon you.

Most of all, I hope you find stiff, heavily formal language just as tight-assed as I do. ;-)

~evolve~

Produce the Note

2009-02-07T10:58:51-05:00

This CNN Live Report features an Ohio councilwoman who urges residents to stay in their home--even if they've been foreclosed on. Find out how and why you might be able to do the same.

Dr. King Speaks: In His Own Words

2009-01-19T16:47:29-05:00

"Since I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor--both black and white--through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So, I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. And so we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. And so we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years--especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask--and rightly so--what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today--my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent." --excerpted from Dr. King's April 4, 1967 speech, Beyond Vietnam--A Time to Break Silence

It is time for all who are against injustice to break the silence, to speak out and formulate and implement actions that destroy this system working day and night to destroy us.

jus' writin' life

Where 4 Art Thou?

Produce the Note

Dr. King Speaks: In His Own Words