It is also the struggle between those who believe you should know your place, and those who want a better place for themselves, their children, and their grandchildren. It is a confrontation between those who believe they have a God given right to pursue their happiness (in the form of wealth and power), at any cost, even if that cost is the denial of basic human needs and the hope (for those who are not among the privileged few0 to obtain their share of the American Dream.
The Radical Right will say that I am indulging in "class warfare." My answer to them is you are absolutely right, but all that I am doing is answering fire with fire. America's oligarchs, the spiritual descendants of the Roman optimates, rekindled the flames of class warfare when the Military-Industrial complex they control had Jack, Malcolm, Bobby, and Martin killed. They threw fuel on the fire when 58,000 Americans died in Southeast Asia. They stoked the inferno to a white heat when they, through their surrogates Reagan and Bush, started the dismemberment of the middle class-destroying lives, communities and hope for a better future for our children-in the name of making a more obscene profit for themselves. Finally, these modern optimates have taken us into a war which we cannot win, not because our military is incapable, but because victory in their avaricious little minds involves keeping de facto control over Iraq's petroleum, something to which the people of Iraq will never consent.
I would like to end this piece with a quote from the Roman tribune and populares Gaius Licinius Macer, who killed himself in 66 B.C.E., after he had been convicted and disgraced on charges of corruption trumped up by the optimates: "If you did not realize, my fellow citizens, what a difference there is between the rights left to you by your forefathers and this slavery imposed upon you by Sulla, I should be obliged to make a long speech...of what wrongs, and how often...I am not unaware how great is the power of the nobles,...and I know how much more secure a faction of wicked men is than an upright man alone. But in addition to the fair hopes which you have inspired and which have dispelled my fear, I have decided that defeat in a struggle for liberty is for a brave man better than to never struggled at all."
"And yet others who were elected to maintain your rights have been lead by personal interest...to turn all their powers and authority against you; and they consider it better to do wrong for a fee than to do right without recompense. Therefor they have now, one and all, submitted to the mastery of a few men, who...have taken possession of the treasury, the armies, the kingdoms and the provinces. These men have made a stronghold from your spoils, while in the meantime you,...after being stripped of every other privilege which your forefathers left you, are left your ballots alone so that now you yourselves may choose your masters, as once you chose your defenders."
"...Of this fact I warn you, and I beg you to bear in mind; do not change the name of things to suit your own cowardice and give to slavery the title of peace. Even peace you will not be allowed to enjoy, if ever wickedness triumph over right and honor..."
"...but whatever happens, the commons are treated as vanquished, and this will be more so every day, so long as your oppressors make greater efforts to retain their mastery than you do to regain your freedom."
In memory of our murdered President, mourned but unredeemed these past forty-four years, let us dedicate ourselves to ensuring the continuation of his ideals and dreams, and to confounding the spiritual descendants of his murderers.
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