"The progressives are always ten years ahead of the rest of the Dems"--those that remain Dems," I told 
Glory Old by @EffStopp
Glory Old by @EffStopp
filmmaker/author Danny Schechter in an interview last year
about my book.
In the wake of Edward
Snowden's shocking revelations about NSA surveillance over data and metadata,
our president has suddenly remembered his huge ex-(?) constituency of Progs who
were more than horrified, more than paralyzed by his reaction in this case and
Bradley Manning's.
But in the wake of
the hair-raising excision of Section 4 and, by extension, a good part of
Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) by SCOTUS late last month, the
Progs are again in shock that both AG Eric Holder and Mr. Obama are facing down
the amputators and vowing to fight back against the proliferation of racist
legislation throughout red states--North Carolina and Texas most egregiously and
compulsively--the latest water let loose from the dike.
Pow!
In case SCOTUS and
Mr. Roberts in particular had any doubts at all that since the passage of the
VRA so much progress has been accomplished by the former Confederate states
(+2), let them witness the explosive and metastasizing retrogression back to
Jim Crow. What are they thinking now?
Mr. Obama promises to
put together legislation to counteract the infamous Shelby County v Holder decision, but tell me how on Earth it will
get past the Tea Party, which will no doubt boil it. The battle will rather be
one-on-one with each outrageous attempt to revive molecules of Jim Crow. Court
systems throughout the South will overflow with lawsuits that may--get
this--graduate back to SCOTUS. Then what?
Executive orders? Is
there one to undo the Shelby decision?
They can't be hiccoughed with each Jim Crow retrogression.
We're headed toward
the midterm elections in 2014. How many voters will be turned away? How quickly
will a new civil war rear its ugly head--SCOTUS v POTUS?
And will all of this
become a red herring while Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden are flayed
backstage?
With globalization,
if not throughout history, a few martyrs have stood up to preserve civilization
rather than its opposite, which masquerades as national defense. As
nationalistic borders dissolve, with the attendant advantages as well as
disadvantages, we are becoming citizens of the world and must fight to maintain
the principles of international law, which protect human rights.
We profess if not
strive to meander toward God and/or the Good even as the Earth and its values
seem to rush toward the inverse: power and greed blind our rulers to the needs
of the vast majority. Vast. Like infinity versus zero.
A small piece of what
has, deo gratias, become a battle
toward human rights at all levels, is emerging in the wake of its diametric
opposite, torture of others attempting to globalize these same values.
Once again the
Progressives stand for conservative values: stand up for hand-counted paper
ballots (HCPB) and human rights at every level from two martyrs to the entire
third world.
You see, creationism
and the anti-choice movement are passà © in another sense. With a reasonably good
educational system, one outgrows them once having learned how to think.
Education is no good, reasoned Powell and then Nixon, contagiously. Look what
happened with the proliferation of human rights activism and realization in the
sixties.
Reprehensible. Drop
out, take off your glasses, and stop thinking and idealizing. Stretch religious
principles to our needs.
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