Urban Communities and Undeclared Presidential Wars

The economic and social damage suffered by our urban black communities since the end of the Cold War has been incalculable.

A signal cause has been the reckless abdication of constitutional duty of our politicians by driving us into endless undeclared wars.  At present, there are nine with no light at the end of the tunnel.  The staggering fully loaded costs already approach $10 trillion—or 50% of the national debt. That extravagance has starved urban communities of infrastructure like schools, hospitals, roads, transportation systems, water, and sanitation. The best and the brightest of youths leave and deprive these communities of invaluable human capital.

Black leadership has remained largely silent when it should be in the vanguard of condemning undeclared presidential wars no in self-defense.  The Black Church should be an inspiration.

It was conceived in the crucible of American slavery and given life in the form of the Absalom Jones’ African American Church 1987 in the very Philadelphia that established the Constitution that is now so cavalierly vandalized under the banner of global domination, i.e., we are the locomotive of mankind and the rest of the world is the caboose.

The rule of law and meaning of Black American citizenship were initially inextricably bound together in ethical, moral and theological tension. But, that tension, drawn out in the lives of Vernon Johns, Howard Thurman and Gardner Taylor, has bowed to lawlessness in this era of the American Warfare State. The central meaning of war is the legalization of first degree murder. And in the words of their compatriot, Martin Luther King, Jr., “American is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.”

Dr. King’s charge from the pulpit of the Riverside church sounded a certain trumpet to oppose our warfare state with unflagging dedication. We should not disappoint a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize who risked much more than he has asked of us.