This is an oversimplification, but one way to think about the Civil Rights Movement, especially from the mid-to-late 1960s, is that there were two philosophical approaches: Dr. King’s faith-based, inclusive, nonviolent strategy; and Malcom X’s Black Power, “the bullet or the ballot,” movement.
“The trouble with [Nazi war criminal and participant in the Final Solution] Adolf Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.
We 21st century humans are pretty good at studying and learning the lessons of history but terrible when it comes to turning this knowledge into action. Consider the myriad books that have been written about the two World Wars, the Vietnam War, Stalinism, the Rwandan Genocide, the HIV / AIDS epidemic, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and other events
I am become the poet of resistance.
I write like a comet, a solar flare,
A sawed-off shotgun,
And where my words no longer suffice
Let them mingle with my blood,
If you’re reading this I assume you don’t need to be convinced that Trump’s policy of separating children from their parents and throwing them into “detention centers” is an abomination, a violation of human rights, and further proof that his administration
What if you can’t do well do good?
What if my electric car
And diligent recycling
Mean less than nothing to
The slave-wage worker
They’ve separated 2,000 children.
No, they’ve discarded them
Like cans of Coca-Cola,
2,000 children who reached our shore
Like sea foam, salty, crying salt,
The squirrels were dancing in the trees
On a cataract of leaves
Occluding the moon,
And fields of tobacco slept
Like unlit dreams.
A cold river divides us:
Cold currents, cold fish, cold limbs,
A carnival of shattered ice
They traverse, barefoot,
With bleeding feet, frostbitten blood,
To risk a safari of lethal ice.
If I baptized ghosts
And knew that they were ghosts;
If I consorted with hallucinations
And accepted the pain of false association;
If I planted a Willow
I am the Founder & CEO of Capital Good Fund, a nonprofit social venture seeking to tackle poverty through financial services. I am also a writer, poet, cyclist, and avid reader. Enjoy my blog!