On 4 April 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave one of the most comprehensive, brave, ethical, compassionate, eloquent speeches of his life, Beyond Vietnam: A time to break the silence. Some say it was the speech that moved enough Americans against the war so that it made it impossible for that war to continue except as one opposed by most Americans, especially important politically because there was conscription.
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America was formally born on July 4, 1776, with the Declaration of Independence, but the USA was not born until September 17, 1787 when the Constitution was adopted. America was born of revolution and a claim that god created human rights and government’s job was to preserve those rights, and any government that violated the peoples’ god-derived rights was not long for this world.
Radio was introduced commercially in 1920, when the Westinghouse Corp. launched station KDKA in Pittsburg. Other stations followed. Because transmission frequencies could be chosen arbitrarily, stations interfered with one another’s broadcasts. The system became chaotic; listeners could hear two stations simultaneously. The Federal government stepped in with the Radio Act of 1927, which created the Federal Radio Commission (FRC) to assign frequencies, limit interference, and regulate ownership. Most important, this act declared that the airwaves belonged to the public.
Miller was presumably exposed annually from an early age to the Passover story from the biblical Book of Exodus, ritualized according to the textual telling in the Haggadah every year at this time around the seder table. Here we learn that the Jewish people were enslaved in Egypt for 400 years and had none of the rights accorded the non-Jewish members of that society – such as they might have been living under the pharaonic god-kings. They were, you know, a “labor class” without rights.
There is a critical difference between disagreement and disparagement. One strengthens justice. The other undermines it.
We got a good thing going!
In moments of global tension, the character of a nation’s leader is not merely observed—it is tested. And when that leader demonstrates an alarming willingness to flirt with destruction, to embrace vengeance over reason, and to treat war as spectacle rather than solemn duty, the question must be asked: Is this leadership—or madness?
For whatever reason, our president has been sucked deeply into just the variety of foreign entanglement that he campaigned against. While he and his absurdly gung-ho “Secretary of War” assert that they are not bent on nation-building like their supposedly hapless and woke predecessors, they sure seem to be trying to build an Iranian state with whom we can “peacefully” coexist—by killing as many potential Iranian leaders as they can.
Donald Trump thinks a 15-point plan will end the war with Iran. Seems like a hope and a prayer. Predictably, Iran rejected it out of hand and has put forward its own plan, which the US will surely reject. Negotiations are not taking place despite Trump’s claims otherwise. All that is happening is that intermediaries are moving back and forth on what looks like mission impossible. The war goes on—Israel and the US continue to strike Iran, Iran continues to retaliate, few ships pass through the Strait of Hormuz, and the US and world economies take increasingly big hits.
If the organizers succeeded in achieving their goals, No Kings 3 may well have turned out to be the largest protest in American history, amplifying resistance against an authoritarian Trump regime.