Urban Thought Collective

John McCain and Barack Obama had their final debate last week during which McCain questioned Obama about Bill Ayers, a former member of a revolutionary organization known as the Weather Underground. McCain said “I don’t care about some washed up terrorist,” but immediately after the debate he began a robo-call campaign stating “Obama worked closely with a terrorist.”

The Weather Underground was a group of angry middle class white college kids whose foremost goal was to end the Vietnam war. I wonder if he understands that this claim of “pallin around with terrorists” is like saying Obama is a pawn for a group similar to Hamas.

Before we can continue we need to know that The Weathermen issues with America were valid. America was in a vicious war in Vietnam, the same war McCain missed because in October 1967, while on a bombing mission over Hanoi, he was shot down, badly injured, and captured by the North Vietnamese and held prisoner until 1973. A war that Martin Luther King described this way: “A war where we wandered into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. These children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food, children who sold their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.”

I can’t understand how Americans refuse to acknowledge the dark past of this nation, a nation that refused to recognize the independence of the Vietnamese, even though the country quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom. We are strange liberators indeed. Our western arrogance has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long, and our citizens allow it to happen in order to live in an ignorant bliss. So much that in the 60’s, the American government started targeting it’s own citizens. Fred Hampton, Martin Luther King, and some believe JFK. Conspiracy theories, aside the citizens oppressed by it’s own nation began to fight back, some with non violent protest, and others used aggression.

Our president John F. Kennedy prophesied the future saying “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” And that’s what happened when the Weathermen began to bomb government buildings out of frustration.

This is why I believe that the claims being made by McCain against Obama are very dangerous for a country whose past is still fresh in the minds of many who lived through these evil events of America’s dark past. Especially when America is now involved in a very Vietnam-ish war in Iraq. Someone needs to tell McCain that his nasty campaign may cost Obama his life, as much as I hate to say it. The tag of a revolutionary is not a tag you want to have pinned on you, if you’re trying to stay alive, because as Huey Newton said of the revolutionary, “he is a doomed man.”

If you take the time to look at America’s current political climate it can easily be summed up by words spoken 40 years before today’s date. When Dr. King stood up to his own government not on civil rights issues but against the war. If you change Vietnam for Iraq the comparison is scary.

“We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak…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.”
- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Martin makes the case on why this election, 40 years after he spoke the words above, is so important. We can not have 4 more years of the same failed policies of Bush. Please vote. Please encourage everyone you know to vote. Our very life might depend on it.

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/3/8/01927/77742

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