Talk by Stewart Burns, Pittsfield Unitarian Church (11/23/2008)

From my own experience I know how John F. Kennedy electrified a generation of youth. Because my father was his friend and biographer, I was fortunate to have known him. Kennedy came to my home in Williamstown when I was a small boy. My family and I visited him in his Georgetown home during the 1960 primaries. As a seventh grader I rented a television set so that my whole school could watch the inauguration. I listened to his inaugural address till I knew it by heart. When JFK was killed, network television trailers encamped at our home on Park Street, our living room turned into a TV studio, for a stream of interviews with my father about his friend.

I revered Kennedy. His magnetism helped propel my own commitment to justice and peace. But my hero did not bring about change, at least at home. He did nothing for civil rights, or to fight poverty, so devoted was he to waging the Cold War. He did nothing, that is, until near the end of his presidency, the raging civil rights movement finally drove him to propose the civil rights bill that he had tried to avoid. Change came from the irresistible mass pressure of the Birmingham movement in May 1963 and the “Negro revolution” that summer, climaxing in the luminous March on Washington that I joined as a 14-year-old.

After the 1964 Civil Rights Act passed Congress, King told President Johnson that the time had come for a law to enfranchise all Americans. LBJ said it was out of the question. Yet within weeks the Selma movement, capping several years of voting rights organizing in the rural South led by Bob Moses and his courageous SNCC cadres, forced Johnson to champion a strict voting rights bill that he pummeled through Congress.

Flash forward to 2008. My concern about Barack Obama is that, like JFK’s daughter Caroline believes, he would be “a president like my father.” He would be idolized like I did Kennedy, he would inspire young people to turn their lives to public service—this is vital—but as president he would do little to move us forward.

Is it enough, in these troubled times, to elect a president who can inspire people to be active citizens—but who compromises with the corporate special interests and congressional barons that dominate our polity? That was Kennedy’s legacy.

Senator Obama evokes the words and timbre of Dr. King. But if he looks to King for lessons, the civil and human rights leader might counsel a bolder response to “the fierce urgency of now.”

First, King might urge Obama to clarify his goals. The senator’s plans for ending the Iraq war and reforming health care seem muddled. Although he has long opposed the war, his withdrawal plan sounds too much like President Nixon’s prolonged effort to “wind down” the Vietnam war. If his health care proposal would not cover everybody—the bottom-line hope for many Americans—he needs to make clear what its advantage is over Hillary’s more universal plan.

King’s paramount goals of ending legal segregation and enfranchising African Americans shone as moral beacons for the nation. King like Obama was a master of symbolic politics, but King’s moral substance gave the symbols their light and fire. What are the concrete changes that Obama stands for? What is the great moral cause that, in another day, followers would have been called upon to risk their lives for? The new politics that Obama strives to build must have not only audacity of hope in the heart but moral fire in the belly.

No American leader championed tolerance and reconciliation as boldly as King. But his relationship-building rhetoric was always authenticated by resolute action for specific justice. He fought tooth and nail for his goals until his nonviolent armies could push no further. Some criticized him for sitting at the table with white supremacists. Yet his adversaries met their match in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma, forced to surrender. Like King, Obama must learn how to mobilize the American people to empower his words, to back them up with massive citizen pressure. As civil rights leader Ella Baker said about King, “Martin didn’t make the movement. The movement made Martin.”

Moreover, King set forth a bountiful vision that added up to more than the sum of his specific aims. Toward the end of his life he fought for a comprehensive bill of economic and social rights that included universal health care and other guarantees of economic justice. What if Obama took a leap of faith and raised a new moral beacon before the American people, that of a Second Bill of Rights to reverse the blight of economic inequality that is impoverishing our nation physically, morally, and spiritually.

When he becomes president, he will be hindered from fighting for real change unless we keep the pressure on. We must take responsibility for holding his feet to the figurative fire, to make sure that, unlike John Kennedy, he delivers on his promises. We cannot afford to wait, even two or three years, for change to come—in particular for the Iraq war to end, and for universal health care to save lives and communities.

Dr. King spoke a great deal, especially toward the end of his life, about the “triple evils” our nation faced: racism, militarism, and poverty. Since his death the triple evils have become reconfigured. Racism is still a fundamental problem, but less than before. Militarism has become worse, especially with the bestowal of vast armaments by the United States to nations around the world, developed and developing nations. Not to mention the chaotic dispersal of nuclear materials. And above all, the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive war that I hope Obama will overturn with alacrity once he arrives in the White House. Poverty, of course, is currently far more serious than it was at anytime since the Great Depression. I’m not talking just about hard-core, inner-city poverty, I’m not just talking about the poverty of the working poor, such as the Memphis sanitation workers King sacrificed his life for forty years ago. I’m also talking about the newly impoverished millions, perhaps even a majority, that columnist David Brooks calls the “formerly middle class.”

“These are people,” he writes, “who achieved middle-class status at the tail end of the long boom, and then lost it.” He’s talking about such people all over the globe, but especially in the United States. “It won’t only be material deprivation that bites,” he concludes. “It will be the loss of social identity, the loss of social networks, of status symbols. These reversals are bound to produce alienation and a political response. If you want to know where the next big social movements will come from, I’d say the formerly middle class.” (NYT, 11/18/2008)

I would redefine the triple evils of yesteryear as the triple perils of today and tomorrow: The first peril is the malignant kinship of race and class, of racism and class. Racial oppression and class exploitation can no longer be seen as separate. The second peril of today and tomorrow is growing militarism at home and abroad as the solution to problems that have no military solutions, like terrorism and the Taliban. The third peril is, of course, global climate change and related environmental catastrophes.

I would like to suggest, however, that the triple perils of today—expanding poverty, more widely shared; mindless militarism; and climate change, are really all rooted in, and interwoven by, a single super-peril that is less visible but the true evil that we, and President Obama, must squarely face. This is the super-peril, the super-evil, of escalating inequality.

Seven score and five years ago last Wednesday, on November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln gave a three-minute talk in a grisly battlefield that was a revolutionary act. In 272 words he redefined the nation’s founding principle as a commitment to equality. President Obama must reclaim that lost and abandoned commitment to equality, or to reducing inequality, as his core mission as president of the United States.  This is the great moral cause that he’s been missing so far, that he must commit himself to and commit his government to. This is the only way that he will succeed as a great president, or even a good one. This will be the crucible of his greatness as a leader, and of his goodness as a human being.

Let’s not get sidetracked by the long debate between equality of opportunity versus equality of condition. Our moral task is to seize the middle ground between these two. In other words, we must realize that vast inequality of condition—for example, corporate CEOs making in half a day what many of their employees make in a full year—makes equal opportunity impossible. Obama faces no greater moral imperative than to substantially reduce the structural inequality that has gone haywire over the past generation. On a national and global level, reducing economic inequality will not only replace poverty with prosperity, but will necessarily replace mindless militarism with rational peacemaking, and will require the containment—not of communism—but of global warming. If global warming were ever to be allowed to come to fruition—not the right metaphor—its devastation will be expressed in a holocaust of global inequality that we can barely imagine. Many coastal nations like Bangladesh or Indonesia will simply be wiped off the map.

Here is where we come in. Without our full engagement as citizens, or as aspiring citizens, of this potentially great nation, to push and prod President Obama to live up to his promises, I predict that the triple perils, and the super-peril of escalating inequality, will barely be touched over the next eight years of an Obama presidency. “Power concedes nothing without a demand,” Frederick Douglass shouted out in protest of the Dred Scott decision that brought on the Civil War. I assure you President Obama will not take any bold action to overcome the triple perils and the super peril, unless we force him to—politely, constructively, and with civility—but firmly and forcefully nonetheless. We simply cannot afford another Eisenhower, or even another Kennedy, or Johnson, to help us negotiate and survive the perils of the twenty-first century. Dr. King told us many times that “the great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right.” It’s up to us to organize ourselves creatively and constructively, and with patient persistence, to protest, to raise hell, but above all to think imaginatively, in order to move us closer to the beloved community that Dr. King dreamed about—the promised land that still lies before us, I have faith, if we are willing to fight for it, nonviolently, compassionately, and with a willingness to compromise—but to make no compromise that compromises our principles. Principled compromise is the only way to go—and I put the accent mark on principled.

I want to close with a few verses from the great African-American poet Langston Hughes:

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive and tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)
*        *        *
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers,
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!

- Langston Hughes