Committee for the Republic
  • Salon Videos
  • Nine Wars
    • Afghanistan
    • Iraq
    • Libya
    • Yemen
    • Somalia
    • Syria
    • Pakistan
    • Al Qaeda
    • ISIS
    • Others?
  • Readings
    • Books
    • Articles
    • Discussion
    • Pledge
    • Resolution
    • Speaker Notes
    • What the Founding Fathers thought of War
    • How Have These Wars Affected you? >
      • Urban Communities
  • Salon Invitation List
  • About US
    • About the Committee
    • Board Members
    • Donate

The Black Face of the American Empire

11/9/2017

0 Comments

 
Since the end of the cold war in 1991, America’s Black communities have suffered incalculable economic and social damage. Through four administrations, Republicans and Democrats, seemingly incapable of agreeing on anything else, have agreed on war as the defining characteristic of American life. Each Party has abdicated its constitutional duty by driving us into endless undeclared wars. Presently, there are nine, few of which the President of the United States can identify on any map with which he is familiar. The staggering costs of these wars exceed $10 trillion—or 50% of our national debt. These imperial disasters have starved our communities, black and white, of the very capacity to survive, robbing them of infrastructure of survival--our schools, hospitals, roads, transportation systems, clean water, and sanitation systems.
And now, it is clear as never before, that our undeclared wars have cost us our will and capacity to prepare for and respond to the violent changes in our climate and environment. Mother nature does not discriminate based on race or economic status. Napa, Puerto Rico, Houston and the Gulf Coast prove the point. But it is the poor, the isolated the marginalized urban and rural, Black and white, communities that suffer the most from our unreadiness and unwillingness to prepare for the environmental catastrophes now upon us. This is a direct result of the waste of our resources abroad in the exercise of immoral war: unconstitutional wars that kill and maim our most sacrificial young people.
Black leadership, particularly our politicians, has remained largely silent about America’s imperial hubris and our Black participation in it. And, It is perhaps that participation, as the apologists and advocates of unconstitutional war that has silenced us. But the Black patriots of the Revolution, of the Civil War, and of World Wars I and II did not join our military to subjugate other people. They did so to preserve and to honor our communities. Our politicians and our secular and religious leaders have forgotten that legacy. But Oberlin, on this corner Mt. Zion corner of Vernon Johns, Howard Thurman and Gardner Taylor, can remind them as few others can, that the pride of the uniform does not extinguish the immorality and illegality of the act.
The moral clarity and bravery that caused Martin Luther King Jr. to proclaim 52 years ago, “America is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world,” has now eluded us. If the Black communities of the United States are to survive the climatic threats now impossible to ignore we must reclaim that most important legacy, visible in the humanity of that monument to Dr. King two blocks away.
Dr. King’s charge from the pulpit of the Riverside Church was no mere description of our lawlessness, it is a continuing call to action to all Americans to live and demand rule of law and in so doing vindicate the moral and civic unity Americans imagined for themselves in 1787.
 
Delbert Spurlock
Comments at Mt Zion Oberlin, Ohio October 20, 2017
0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    Archives

    November 2024
    November 2017
    April 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    June 2016
    January 2016
    July 2012
    June 2012
    April 2012
    February 2012
    January 2012
    December 2011
    April 2009

    Categories

    All
    Attornery General Nominee
    Bruce Fein
    Congressional Dereliction
    Congressional War Power
    Constitution
    Constitutional Oath
    Democracy
    Executive Abuses
    Executive Agreements
    Foreign Policy
    Hillary Clinton
    House Of Representatives
    Indispensable Nation
    Intentional Law
    Military Alliances
    National Security
    National Strategy
    Nato
    Presidential Election
    Presidential Wars
    Regime Change
    Senate
    Treaty Clause
    War Hawks
    War Only In Self Defense
    War Only In Self-defense
    War On Terror
    War Powers

    RSS Feed

Home

Copyright © 2024
Photo from jmorgan
  • Salon Videos
  • Nine Wars
    • Afghanistan
    • Iraq
    • Libya
    • Yemen
    • Somalia
    • Syria
    • Pakistan
    • Al Qaeda
    • ISIS
    • Others?
  • Readings
    • Books
    • Articles
    • Discussion
    • Pledge
    • Resolution
    • Speaker Notes
    • What the Founding Fathers thought of War
    • How Have These Wars Affected you? >
      • Urban Communities
  • Salon Invitation List
  • About US
    • About the Committee
    • Board Members
    • Donate