Unfortunately, in the midst of all of this, the world's sole superpower spends more than 50% of its discretionary national receipts on weapons of mass destruction and war, and cajoles other rich governments to spend inordinate amounts of their national treasure on weapons of war, death, and destruction and less on diplomacy and human and Earth dignity.
And that is where our individual activism and the power of the people can redirect attention and focus to the things that are truly important today.
And just as in the Civil Rights Movement of the United States, there is a role for everyone to play.
Why is it that nearly 70% of the people in the U.S. are against President Obama's wars, and yet the people seem powerless to stop them?
My response is that the American people have not yet come to understand the power that they truly possess.
Thus, the actions of the ALBA countries and Kenya become extraordinarily important in demonstrating that there is another way to organize human activity: a way such that human life and the life of and on this planet are not jeopardized.
And the events of North Africa, East Europe, and West Asia show us that every one of us is capable of doing extraordinary things when we muster our individual will power and proceed.
Two years ago, I found myself in the middle of a political firestorm when, at the start of Operation Cast Lead, I decided to accompany a group of human rights activists and deliver medical supplies to the people of Gaza. The Free Gaza Movement boat I was in, the Dignity, was rammed by the Israeli military and disabled. One of the doctors onboard yelled to us all that we must prepare ourselves mentally to die. And I commenced to do just that.
I wondered how the world would view me, a divorced mother of one, who had left her son who was about to enter law school, to go off and try to save the lives of children I did not even know. And when the Israelis rammed us, it dawned on me that I didn't even know how to swim. All of a sudden, I became so scared--I had even put my life jacket on upside down, inside out--I don't know what I had done. The English doctor noticed and in the midst of our panic, time came to a crashing halt as he untied my life jacket, took it off me, turned it correctly, put it back on to me, retied it, and said "There now."
I was afraid of falling into the sea. I was afraid of being crushed between our boat and the huge Israeli warship that had menaced us all night and then had finally crashed into us. I was afraid of what it would feel like to drown. And the embarrassment of being afraid of what others would say of me as a mother after I was dead.
But,
somehow, in the midst of all of that, I remembered my ancestors. My
ancestors who braved the slave rebellions and the Civil Rights Movement
and who made the United States a better place--not a perfect place by
any stretch of the imagination--but a better place for Africa's stolen
children. They, who had nothing but their unity, used that as a hammer
to club the United States out of its slavery first and then out of its
apartheid.
I remembered what it must have been like for my own great-grandmother who could have passed for white, but instead chose to live in the segregated South and suffer the daily indignities of what it meant to be Black in the United States during her day.
I remembered my father, who picketed his place of employment by himself because the other Blacks were too afraid to stand up for their own dignity;
I remembered Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr. who knew that their own government wanted them dead, but they
never stopped and they never gave in.
I remembered the women from the enslaved Sojourner Truth who plaintively asked "Ain't I a Woman" at a Woman's Convention where the issue was women's right to vote. And I remembered Fannie Lou Hamer, who stood up to the President of the United States of America when the Mississippi Democratic Party refused to seat Black delegates to the Democratic Party's national convention, when she said, "I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired."
And with ancestry like that, having struggled like that, there was no way I could give in to my fears.
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