[Oe List ...] Fwd: August 28 for ST

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Number four.



-----Original Message-----
From: Jaime R Vergara <pinoypanda2031 at aol.com>
To: editor <editor at saipantribune.com>
Sent: Fri, Aug 22, 2014 3:00 pm
Subject: August 28 for ST


I have a Dream
 
Proprietaryrights on the tape of MLK, Jr.'s I have aDream, a speech delivered at theLincoln memorial in 1963 was bought by magician David Copperfield, who donatedit to the National Civil Rights Museum to promote King's message ofnonviolence.  Copperfield said Kinginspired people to dream. "That's too important for one person topossess," Copperfield said of the recording.  "You have to share that with people toremind as many people as possible of the message."
 
My youth was shapedby the same poetry and images.  It markeda turning point in the Civil Rights' movement towards the tactic of activenon-violence, later linked to the war in Southeast Asia to counter racialpersecution off the back of America's dark skinned to the squinty slit eyedOrientals.  
 
Today marks the 51styear of that speech.  It was a year afterthat this probinsyanong Pinoyze arrivedin the Midwest of America, starry-eyed about what I thought was already the endof racial discrimination only to find out that violent defiance over legislatedlaws were just beginning.
 
George Wallace, afellow Methodist (when I still counted myself in the group) and AlabamaGovernor who entered office with a liberal record, turned out to be the posterboy of southern resistance against the abolition of the then recognized laws onsegregation that legitimized white folks being more equal before the law thantheir darker skinned fellow citizens.
 
Racialdiscrimination followed my footsteps, from the benign patronizing kind as wellas the vicious exclusionary variety.  My laterprimal spouse's mother in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, a white suburb of Chicago atthe time, said of me when her daughter and I started to be more romanticallyinvolved: "Look how dark he is?" It was a mark of her daughter's progressiveness that she went ahead andmarried me anyway, even following my vocational service halfway around theworld!
 
One of my first LPalbums in '65 was titled "In White America", which had MLK's recordedI have a Dream speech with othervirulent pronouncements from white supremacist voices.  The speech inspired an audience, especiallyso when the King's voice was muted by a shot at a Nashville Motel in April'68.  However, the dreaming could not bestilled; it turned into a process replicated around the globe, later finding aforgiving voice in the streets of Soweto in South Africa.
 
On a sunny Februaryday in 1968, I joined some students in an all-day, all-night drive from Dallas,Texas where I attended seminary, to Washington, D.C. to join Civil Rights andAnti-War activists in a joint march to Arlington Cemetery in protest of theVietnam War that was sucking the lifeblood of the nation's resources meant tofund LBJ's War on Poverty.  
 
King spoke to thegathered audience at the Presbyterian Church on 13th Street and New York Avenuedescribing how the American Dream has been preempted by a policy parading aspatriotism that saw Vietnamese as "gooks" upending the American wayof life with its 'communist' sympathies. King with dignitaries was locked-in-step in front of marchers, as I,with my University Press card, took pictures of the fateful march.
 
What made thisintensely personal was what happened to me on the day Martin bit a bullet amonth later.  I was in a car crash thatknocked me out only to awaken to the heavy fumes of gasoline so I got out ofthe back seat and managed to call my school roommate who immediately came tofetch me.  
 
The natural adrenalineserved me well until 30 minutes into the ride when we drove into the Universitycampus.  I could not move a muscle.  I was put on a wheel chair at the infirmary andI did not recall being dressed to bed.  Iwoke up feeling groggy and sedated.  
 
It was midnight inGreensboro, North Carolina where my GF attended College.  She phoned in tears bewailing that her citywas in flames as rioting followed King's assassination, doubly mournful to findout that her BF was in the infirmary from a car accident.  My attending nurse who came in to check onme, who otherwise was just a pleasantly plump addition to the room, when sheheard the news of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., blurted out the vilestvenom from a racist southern heart: "Thank God, they finally got theNigger!"
 
Literally a deadman walking among the living, I girded my soul with MLK's brand of dreaming andjoined a global band of folks who did not hesitate to lay down their being inthe barbwires of history in order to manifest the reality that belonging meansbeing a part of those who made these truths to be self-evident:
all the goods of the earthbelong to all the people;
all the decisions of history belongto all the people;
all the gifts of humanness belongto all the people;
all the earth belongs to allthe people.
 
A decade of livinga lifestyle reflecting the pronouncement, it finally dawned on me, horror ofhorrors, that the earth, the people, and I, are one!  To love the earth, one took the planet andall its creatures as one's self.


j'aime la vie
pinoypanda2031 at aol.com

yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today. participate. In all, celebrate!

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