‘The Summer Of Our Discontent’
Barack Obama recently expressed something not often shared outside of black America. He spoke of a “quiet riot” that threatens to bubble over.
Specifically, he is speaking to the notion that black folks are beyond fed up with Bush administration’s continued lack of action in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina some 20 months after it happened.
I don’t believe that these emotions are specific to this issue as much as this issue is representative of a general disdain that this group and their allies have expressed toward black Americans. It’s almost as if they collectively said, “if they aren’t voting for us, why should their lives or well-being matter?”
I, for one, hope that we can take this rage and move it to a direction that pushes us more and more towards self-reliance but, I don’t want the rage to go away. A pearl is born of agitation so, I only hope that we can take all our agitation and move it in a way that serves to help us.
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Wow, a black blogger.
Yes, that’s a horrible thing to say, but you know that’s how millions of white progressives react. I mean, I didn’t hear about Steve Gilliard until he was dead. This is no good. The anti-Bush movement on the net is entirely defined by white leftists and white right-wing anti-government types. Too much of the best denunciation of Bush and his creeping tyranny come from right-wing extremists because Bush is carrying out their worst fantasies about Clinton and they can’t deny the implications. But those bloggers have zero, nicht, nada to say about the African-American situation under Bush, and according to the income figures I’ve seen it’s damn bad. The white liberal bloggers, meanwhile, underplay how bad the black situation is because it means that nothing that blacks supposedly gained under Clinton was irreversible, therefore future liberal promises won’t be worth much to them. Liberals keep trying to redistribute the pie; they can’t proclaim that the pie is about to explode in a global economic/environmental cataclysm.
To me, if America keeps voting in right-wing imperial presidents who undo any progress made since 1932, you kind of have to start talking about revolution. And you have to start organizing it before the anti-Bush rightists do, because they just want to dismantle the police state so that it can return to its “natural” form: a plantation state. We are like the various anti-Saddam groups in Iraq waiting for the guy to be overthrown so we can each make our play for power. We have no room in our own visions for the other dissident groups.
If African-Americans are really ready to defend their neighborhoods against all future monsters, they need to get beyond the white left in anticipating the effects of global warming or peak oil, because no one else will be on their side in the chaos that will result. The Internet is the place where I learned practically everything I know about peak oil. That’s why the lack of African-American bloggers as influential as, say, The Oil Drum or Juan Cole or dailykos or Wayne Madsen or Prison Planet is very dangerous. Katrina was the beginning of system failure, like when the Roman legions abandoned border provinces to save money. Iraq was a last desperate play to steal enough wealth to keep the American empire going, and it is failing. The instinct of the GOP ideologues will be to abandon the cities, tainted by Negritude, and try to run a laughable fake civilization from the suburbs. As that slowly degenerates into barbarism, whoever can preserve human decency in the cities will attract whatever is left of enterprise. That will require schools, electricity, clean water and food, and the congregation of smart people. The white suburbs aren’t even beginning to plan for this crisis.
June 8th, 2007 at 8:30 pm