A Native Son

Weekly Wrap Up - May 1, 2026

Eddie — Fri, 01 May 2026 17:40:33 GMT

Summary

In this Weekly Wrap Up, Eddie addresses the collapsing ceasefire in Lebanon, highlighting deadly exchanges between Hezbollah and the IDF alongside escalating settler violence in Jerusalem. Domestically, he confronts a devastating new Supreme Court ruling by drawing powerful historical parallels to the brutal resistance against the 1966 civil rights movement. Recalling how Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. overcame deep despair during that era, Eddie urges his audience to turn their grief into defiance, calling for a nationwide "Operation Show Out" and continued participation in "May Day Strong" protests to actively reclaim American democracy.

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Middle East Conflict & Israel

Iran War & Global Economy

Political Violence & WHCA Dinner

DOJ Investigations

Supreme Court & Voting Rights

Protests & Civil Action

Photos Of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Stanford University. Martin Luther King Jr. & Joan Baez march to integrate schools, Grenada, MS, 1966. Stanford Digital Repository, purl.stanford.edu/hg676jb4964.
Stanford University. Eva Grace Lemon (7 years old) Martin Luther King Jr., Aretha Willis (7), march to integrate schools Grenada, MS, 1966. Stanford Digital Repository, purl.stanford.edu/jc437rk5536.
Stanford University. Eva Grace Lemon (7 years old), Martin Luther King Jr., Aretha Willis (7), march to integrate schools Grenada, MS, 1966. Stanford Digital Repository, purl.stanford.edu/bj022hr0954.
Stanford University. Martin Luther King Jr. (left) & Andy Young, 1966 Montgomery AL airport. Stanford Digital Repository, purl.stanford.edu/bj665vr4930.

A Shooting and a Sound

Eddie — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 15:14:21 GMT

On Saturday shots were fired at the White House Correspondents dinner. Secret Service agents and police rushed to evacuate the president and other members of the cabinet. Guests hid under their tables as officers shouted instructions. Reporters offered commentary in real time. I watched stunned and, honestly, in disbelief. This is where we are as a country. Violence simmers underneath the political discord waiting to erupt.

Of course, Trump took full advantage of the moment. “When you’re impactful, they go after you. When you’re not impactful, they leave you alone,” he boasted. In a Truth Social post, Trump also argued for the need for a White House ballroom. The shooting “would never have happened with the Militarily Top Secret Ballroom.” It felt like a coordinated campaign as MAGA accounts on social media echoed the sentiment.

Over the next few days, we will be inundated with commentary about the shooting and the alleged shooter, Cole Tomas Allen. Conspiracy theories will circulate on social media. Some will decry the violence. Others will suggest that the shooting was a false flag. Conservatives will use this as evidence of the violence of the radical left (no matter what the evidence suggests). Liberals will call for gun control.

Standard political theater in these troubling times.

All the while, Americans still face the implications of the Iran war at the pump and in grocery stores. Trump continues to plummet in the polls, and we have no idea what he is capable of doing because of it. Politicians play their games. And the country barrels into whatever chaos awaits around the corner.

It is enough to drive us all mad. Breaking news swirling around our heads. I imagine eyes darting back and forth. People and algorithms demanding our attention. Something sour sits at the back of the throat and in the pit of our stomachs. You want to scream, “STOP!” and turn your face away from it all. You pine for some sense of normalcy and calm.

Before I heard the news of the shooting on Saturday, I smiled to myself as I recalled a conversation with my son earlier that day. There was something in his tone that reminded me of his face when he was toddler, of the sound of his giggles, the joy in his unstable run with his arms stretched out behind his back, as I chased after him. His chicklets, as the dentist used to describe his little teeth, exposed for all to see.

He was excited about his new job as an associate attorney with the Alameda Public Defender service. He talked about what he hoped to do as a public defender, his anticipation of having his own caseload, of doing some good in a system where good is often under assault.

I heard all the words, beamed with pride that he has finally landed, but my ears focused on the sound – his tone – not the words. This was my baby.

Time is ruthless in its indifference. We cling to what we have and what we remember. And as we age our grip tightens, because even though you are slowing down, life moves at an unsettling pace. Your parents, if you are blessed to still have them around, once indefatigable are now fragile and vulnerable. Your children grow up and start their own lives. Photos languish in drawers. Some memories fade. Regrets linger.

But there are moments that trigger memories that are etched in your DNA. Sounds that remind you of the beauty and innocence of your baby. I can hear when he’s sad or worried. I know the sound when he is teasing me. I recognize the slump in the shoulders or the distant eyes when he is doubting himself.

But that sound of joy, my God, takes me back to when he was a little baby in his bouncy chair. I would pull him close to my face and make some silly sounds, and he would laugh a full belly laugh. A bit of heaven. That’s what I heard and felt when he expressed his excitement about the new job.

And then the nastiness of the world intruded.

I know we will be swamped with the news about the shooting, about Trump, about the damn chaos that overruns everything. But I am going to hold tight to the reminder: to the joy in my baby’s voice amid the cacophony of these maddening days.

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Weekly Wrap Up - April 24, 2026

Eddie — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 19:13:29 GMT

Summary

In this Weekly Wrap Up, Eddie cautiously welcomes a three-week ceasefire extension in Lebanon, though he condemns Israel’s continued military operations and occupation of the region. Turning to a heavy domestic news cycle, he calls out the DOJ’s weaponized indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center, escalating racist rhetoric from the Trump administration, and the growing pushback against the economic fallout of the Iran war. Eddie - as always - concludes by urging us to channel our outrage into collective action, calling on listeners to actively salvage American democracy by joining ongoing nationwide protests.

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Middle East & International Conflict

Iran War & Executive Powers

Elections & Redistricting

Public Opinion & Conservative Media Criticism

Immigration Rhetoric & Diplomatic Fallout

DOJ Investigations

Labor & Protests

Live with Eddie Glaude

Eddie — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 18:38:04 GMT

Available for iOS and Android

When The Lights Go Out in Cuba

Jafari Sinclaire Allen — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 15:46:55 GMT

The lights have gone out in Havana before. I was there for some of it — in the late nineties and into the early aughts– the years the Cubans called the Special Period, when the grid would go down on a schedule everyone knew and no one liked. These apagones, or rolling blackouts were absorbed as chronic conditions: with typical ingenuity and low-grade fury. I marveled, then mirrored the practiced calm of people who knew the lights would eventually come back. They always came back. Folks planned around them; lit candles, moved toward wherever the sea breeze could be felt, and congregated on moonlit streets, because Havana has its own kind of light at night. The matinee disco in El Vedado would go dark for a few hours and come back up. Dancers would simply pick up where they left off — electric slide meeting rumba in the resumed dark, which is to say, in the resumed life. The apagones did not spell stasis or defeat. They were evidence of improvisation under siege — and the proof was that the lights kept coming back. What was warped was never the island. It was the perception of the island, the Cuba of the American postcard, which required stasis to sustain its own meaning.

When I heard what was happening now — the grid collapsed three times in March 2026, eleven million people in the dark with no schedule, no promised return, no hours to plan around — my mind went immediately to Assata. To Nehanda and the microbrigade on the outskirts of the city where my sister lived, in that small apartment, on so little, with such grace. I thought about what it means when the lights go out and no one can tell you when they are coming on again. When Venceremos finally runs out — not in defeat but in exhaustion.

I did not expect to return to this material through darkness. But here we are.

I want to offer a different quality of light by which to read this moment — the kind that allows us to see the failures of our liberation movements as something other than proof positive of the failure of our living. That is what Nehanda taught me. It is what I owe her, and what I owe the island that kept her. The disco ball—that kaleidoscopic time-space machine which holds the living and the dead in the same turning light, hangs motionless.

I wrote two books reflecting on these themes — ¡Venceremos?, which chronicled Black Cubans negotiating the Revolution’s promises and failures; and There’s a Disco Ball Between Us, which returned to Nehanda and Assata, and the question their lives in exile, like those who were at home on the island, kept posing: what does it mean to insist on living a ‘good’ life, rather than merely enduring it — inside conditions that seem to make it impossible.

I first went to Cuba in 1998, as a student researcher. I went back, and kept going back, for years, not only as an ethnographer chronicling the island’s singular position, but also — mostly — because of relationships. Underneath all of it, two women whom I love: Nehanda Isoke Abiodun, who taught me in Havana what political exile costs; and the woman I called ‘Sister’ in print because she was still alive and in the crosshairs of bounty hunters planning her capture. Both showed me what Che Guevara meant when he said: at the risk of seeming ridiculous — a true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. If he had danced until dawn with them as I did, he would have added that an effective revolutionary is fueled by friendship, laughter, and good rum. Both of those sisters died free on that shimmering island that I too came to love and respect. Nehanda in 2019. Assata Shakur — whom I can now name, since there is nothing left that can harm her — in 2025.

Today, the situation is worse than I would have imagined when I was living in Cuba and for the long while my attention was trained on the island and its neighbors. There was widespread deprivation during the Special Period, but la lucha — the structural and profound daily struggle through which most Cubans faced intermittent blackouts, food shortages, and crumbling infrastructure, with creativity and communal ingenuity as a form of defiance — did not signal altogether surrendering belief that the Revolution had promised them something real, amid accumulating broken promises. They were able to improvise with the help of openings in tourism and cultural exchange that provided a thin but real circulation of outside connection and divisas (foreign currency) — along with the freedoms and humiliations that come with each. Today, things are different.

The discontent and frustration that many of us had documented for many years finally cracked the surface in July 2021 — when Black Cubans in the island’s poorest neighborhoods took to the streets in the largest protests since the Revolution, chanting Patria y Vida! (Homeland and Life), riffing off the revolutionary slogan of homeland or death, and abajo la dictadura (down with the dictatorship). A 2020 survey of over a thousand Cubans, by sociologists Katrin Hansing and Bert Hoffmann, documented what my fieldwork had shown and what the government’s own statistics refused to name: racial inequalities were returning along prerevolutionary lines— structured by who had been able to leave and send remittances, who had access to the new private economy, and who was left to luchar in the streets. The government’s response to the protests was mass arrest and sentences of up to twenty years. Many of those who bore the longest sentences were Black.

There is also, far beyond Cuba, a recognition of the material support of the Cuban revolutionary government: among Black people in the diaspora, the international left, and among the nations and movements that had understood Cuba not as a perfect socialist experiment but as proof that a small, embargoed island could stand against the empire and offer something — medical care, hurricane and earthquake relief, solidarity, sanctuary — that no one else dared to attempt. This is expressed in the Cuban revolutionary slogan Venceremos! (we will win) — eventually, and in any case we will continue to fight. Hasta la Victoria Siempre (Always, until victory), the slogan goes. That recognition and commitment was heard and felt differently in different places. In Havana it had the specific ring of people who had staked their lives on it. In Kingston and Port-au-Prince, for example, the resonance of this promise was profoundly felt — doctors who arrived when no one else would come. Closer to home for me: in Harlem, it echoed for a people who had sent their sisters there for protection and hoped for the best. My book started with turning this declarative exclamation into an interrogative — more urgent and plaintive because that is what I owed my respondents — ¡Venceremos? Will we win?

Cuba sent doctors to Jamaica for nearly fifty years; to West Africa during Ebola; to Pakistan in the wake of the 2005 earthquake, after Washington refused its citizens the same offer post-Katrina and the failure of faulty levees. The record is long. The blockade is settling accounts with all of it.

This is the Cuba now going dark. Blocked by U.S. policy and U.S. ships, oil had not arrived in three months. A rapist had announced he can “take” and “do anything I want” with Cuba. Oil tankers came to the edge of Cuban waters and were turned away. The Sea Horse diverted. The Ocean Mariner veered off toward the Bahamas. When the U.S. temporarily eased Russian oil sanctions globally in early March, as it entered another war, it explicitly excluded Cuba. But the Russian ship Anatoly Kolodkin docked at Matanzas on March 31, with 730,000 barrels– the first oil in three months. Trump let it through. Even rapists have creditors. “We don’t mind somebody getting a boatload,” he said, “because they have to survive.” Then he said Cuba was finished. A second Russian tanker is on its way.

The response from those who remember what Cuba gave them was immediate.The Nuestra América Convoy — 650 people from 38 nations on a boat named for José Martí, because governments could not do what the people would — arrived in Havana carrying solar panels and medicine and themselves. Mexico dispatched naval vessels. Even as his own government was ending its fifty-year medical agreement under U.S. pressure, Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness stood before CARICOM and told the chilling truth: “Humanitarian suffering serves no one. A prolonged crisis in Cuba will not remain confined to Cuba.”

Still, his government did what was expedient. Jamaica ended its fifty-year medical agreement with Cuba under U.S. pressure — withdrawing 277 Cuban health workers from the rural clinics they had staffed since 1976, through hurricanes and pandemics and the ordinary emergencies of Black Caribbean life. The words and the deed were not meant to reconcile. History, and the Jamaican people, will have to decide what to call that; just as we in the US must sit with the silence from mainstream US Black political organizations — another telling fact about where and how far the embattled can reach toward one another.

Cuba trained Haitian doctors and sent medical brigades when the earthquake struck in 2010 — arriving before anyone else, as they always did. Like Black US, Haiti cannot return the favor now. It is fighting for its own survival. Haiti’s government is overwhelmed by gang violence and political collapse — its people among the most embattled in the hemisphere. Two of the oldest Black republics in this part of the world — both born in revolution, both subjected to more than a century of U.S. intervention: both still paying the price. They cannot reach each other across the water right now.

Nelson Mandela’s first trip after his release from prison was to Havana, because Cuba had understood in practice and not only in rhetoric, that there are obligations that do not run upward toward power, but sideways— toward the ones the powerful have marked for destruction. In contrast stands the logic of the colonizer — the man who has decided that the only sovereignty is his own and the question of consent does not apply to him: “I could do anything I want with it,” he said, echoing the logic and language of rape.

These are the logics that my respondents in ¡Venceremos? were negotiating — through their friendships and everyday insistence on a deeper self that was not available for consumption — insisting, you do not own me, no matter what your deed says. Assata and Nehanda knew this. Their refusal to be captured and their presence on that island as free women was embodied and undeniable proof against this logic. Cuba kept them against the full pressure of the United States government: through every administration from Kennedy through the current regime — resisting decades of diplomatic coercion, including from Obama, whose FBI doubled the bounty on Assata’s head and placed her on the Most Wanted Terrorist list, even as he made the only solid gestures toward normalization and, in a historic turn, visited the island.

The man now conducting those negotiations — the Cuban-American US Secretary of State Marco Rubio — spent his Senate career demanding that Cuba return Assata Shakur, whom he said “belongs in jail.” After her death in September 2025, he declared that Cuba “continues to provide a safe haven for terrorists and criminals, including fugitives from the United States.” The embargo remained. The bounty remained. Cuba kept them both anyway. Cuba said no repeatedly, consistently, at a real cost to itself. The current blockade is, in part, the continuation of that demand by other means.

It is undeniable that the revolutionary government that sheltered Assata and Nehanda also silenced, surveilled, and in some periods persecuted Black Cuban artists, queer Cubans, and Black women whose politics were too loud or too embodied — illegible in the narrow grammar of revolution, — as were those whose politics were seen as too connected to the U.S. imperial project. Nearly all of my respondents from ¡Venceremos? left the island before my book was published. The island that was a Palenque, a maroon camp, for two extraordinary African women born in the US, was also a place from which a generation of Black Cubans fled. Both things are true. Irresolution is a fact of Black life.

And here is another instructive irresolution: where the Black left failed, Cuba came through. The conditions that made exile necessary— putting Nehanda and Assata on FBI lists and in danger and eventually on planes to Havana, away from their families, were conditions that the Black left in the United States was not powerful enough, not organized enough, not sufficiently free of its own patriarchy and homophobia and factionalism to address. Nehanda’s mother, Large Marge, told me: it is like fighting a nuclear bomb with a slingshot. She thought it was stupid. I celebrate the courage, but also mourn the shoddiness of the slingshot.

We are back, therefore — or rather, we never left — the conjuncture Huey P. Newton called “survival pending revolution.” In Cuba and elsewhere, this is a moment in which the scale and depth of retrenchment and dispossession means that the first order of business is not necessarily to win but to live to fight another day. This is what the Jamaican PM announced. “Capitulation” with a gun to one’s head. We recognize these old plantation logics. To keep the people fed and housed and breathing; to hold the line against the possibility of something better. Newton understood “survival” as a way station, a set of programs and commitments that would sustain the people until conditions permitted a more frontal engagement.

But survival pending revolution describes the floor. It does not describe what people do on or above the floor. As the t-shirts I see young people wearing say, “Assata taught me,” and Nehanda taught me something very different. What must we preserve; reach toward; insist on and refuse to give up, even when everything else has been stripped away? Nehanda fundraising to distribute much-needed hygiene products and foundation garments to Cuban women (for “uplift” she said cheekily); scrimping to cater gala ‘Anti-Imperialist Thanksgiving’ dinners; and she and I eating black market lobster brought to my door after having fallen off a truck bound for a resort, and drinking the oldest rum we could find in Havana — not despite the deprivation, not in ignorance of it, but fully inside it with full knowledge of what surrounded her on the island she could not leave, is beyond the floor of survival: it reaches toward joy and insists on pleasure. It does not describe the electric slide arriving in El Vedado and leaving with rumba moves added, which is to say, transformed into something neither origin could have produced alone. It cannot begin to describe Nehanda at her 50th birthday — daughter of Oshun, resplendent in gold, light flickering in the warm glow of Caribbean sunset. We danced on that floor through the dark night, until sunrise. Black folks dance on the floor of survival.

I have spent more than twenty years as an ethnographer trying to understand what happens in those moments — parsing life and death on the dancefloor. Not the politics of survival, but the something else. The practices, pleasures, and the ethical philosophies by which Black people have always insisted on a life that is not merely endured but lived. What I have been calling, in my notebooks and my thinking for some time now, ‘the Black good life’ — not an escape from the murderous conjuncture of plantation logics, and certainly not ignorant of its structuring function. It is a response, and sometimes a refusal, that is as sophisticated a theory and movida as any other.

Nehanda understood this and tried to teach me in a way Marxist theory and continental philosophy never could. She said: I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically wrong with a Mercedes, I just think everyone ought to have one. That is not a contradiction. It is a critique of who gets to flourish, and an equally serious insistence on the answer: everyone. That flourishing is not bourgeois and is not naive and is not a distraction from more serious forms of political engagement. It is itself a form of political engagement — perhaps the oldest one we have and certainly what we can manage in the current tense of pending.

Nehanda Isoke Abiodun — Cheri, Cherry, Nia, LaVerne, Mama Nehanda — died in Havana on January 30, 2019. She had lived on that island for nearly thirty years, protected; a New Afrikan revolutionary who arrived as a fugitive and became the Godmother of Cuban hip-hop — tutoring generations of Afro-Cuban artists in Black history and consciousness, holding Anti-Colonial Thanksgiving every year, keeping her people’s secrets and fighting for their material lives. She said that the prospect of going to prison frightened her but living as a neo-slave terrorized her. I wrote about her in There’s a Disco Ball Between Us, another love letter I owed her. Assata Shakur died in Havana on September 25, 2025. She was 78 years old. The Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced it simply and quietly: health conditions and advanced age. She had lived in Cuba for forty-one years — also protected by a revolutionary government that understood her not as a fugitive, but as what both women were: a political prisoner of a war the United States had waged against its own Black population. Both women died free, and we have the contradictory and embattled Cuban revolution to thank for that.

Cuba’s revolutionary government was not — is not — without serious failures of its own. I argued in ¡Venceremos? that the Revolution recuperated pre-revolutionary racial and sexual ideologies rather than dismantling them. The reparative, affirmatively acting policies that might have begun to address the historically entrenched inequities of the Cuban slave state never materialized.

Still, the Revolution had not only promised something real but had delivered in a number of ways; under the crushing weight of the U.S. Embargo, which now looks bent on finishing its job of isolation and conquest. The revolution — however flawed and shot through with the same racial and sexual logics it claimed to have overturned — was worth defending. My respondents believed this, in different registers and with different degrees of irony. Assata believed it — she called Cuba “one of the largest, most resistant and most courageous Palenques that has ever existed.” Nehanda believed it, with the peculiar conviction of someone for whom Cuba was a lifeline. I believe it, too, in my way. Or, I believed in the people who believed in it, which sometimes may be the same thing.

The grid is down. And they are gone. The disco ball hangs motionless in the dark.

I am still learning what they were teaching. And I know there is still dancing in Cuba. Even in the dark.

Jafari Sinclaire Allen is professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies, in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies (AAADS) at Columbia University, where he is the director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS), and editor-in-chief of Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Society, and Culture

A Long Way From 'Family of Man'

Eddie — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 14:29:29 GMT

I have been thinking about Vaclav Havel a lot lately. So, I decided to reprint the last section of his speech to a joint session of Congress on February 20, 1990.

~Eddie

Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve only been president for two months, and I haven’t attended any schools for presidents. My only school was life itself. Therefore, I don’t want to burden you any longer with my political thoughts, but instead I will move on to an area that is more familiar to me, to what I would call the philosophical aspect of these changes that still concern everyone, although they are taking place in our corner of the world.

As long as people are people, democracy, in the full sense of the word, will always be no more than an ideal. One may approach it as one would the horizon in ways that may be better or worse, but it can never be fully attained. In this sense, you, too, are merely approaching democracy. You have thousands of problems of all kinds, as other countries do. But you have one great advantage: You have been approaching democracy uninterruptedly for more than 200 years, and your journey toward the horizon has never been disrupted by a totalitarian system.

Czechs and Slovaks, despite their humanistic traditions that go back to the first millennium, have approached democracy for a mere 20 years, between the two world wars, and now for the three and a half months since the 17th of November last year.

The advantage that you have over us is obvious at once.

The communist type of totalitarian system has left both our nations, Czechs and Slovaks, as it has all the nations of the Soviet Union and the other countries the Soviet Union subjugated in its time, a legacy of countless dead, an infinite spectrum of human suffering, profound economic decline and, above all, enormous human humiliation. It has brought us horrors that fortunately you have not known.

It has given us something positive, a special capacity to look from time to time somewhat further than someone who has not undergone this bitter experience. A person who cannot move and lead a somewhat normal life because he is pinned under a boulder has more time to think about his hopes than someone who is not trapped that way.

What I’m trying to say is this: We must all learn many things from you, from how to educate our offspring, how to elect our representatives, all the way to how to organize our economic life so that it will lead to prosperity and not to poverty. But it doesn’t have to be merely assistance from the well-educated, powerful and wealthy to someone who has nothing and therefore has nothing to offer in return.

We, too, can offer something to you: our experience and the knowledge that has come from it.

This is a subject for books, many of which have already been written and many of which are yet to be written. I shall therefore limit myself to a single idea.

The specific experience I’m talking about has given me one great certainty: Consciousness precedes being, and not the other way around, as the Marxists claim.

For this reason, the salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and in human responsibility.

Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better in the sphere of our being as humans, and the catastrophe toward which this world is headed -- be it ecological, social, demographic or a general breakdown of civilization -- will be unavoidable. If we are no longer threatened by world war or by the danger that the absurd mountains of accumulated nuclear weapons might blow up the world, this does not mean that we have definitively won. We are, in fact, far from the final victory.

We are still a long way from that “family of man.” In fact, we seem to be receding from the ideal rather than growing closer to it. Interests of all kinds -- personal, selfish, state, nation, group, and, if you like, company interests -- still considerably outweigh genuinely common and global interests. We are still under the sway of the destructive and vain belief that man is the pinnacle of creation and not just a part of it and that therefore everything is permitted.

There are still many who say they are concerned not for themselves but for the cause, while they are demonstrably out for themselves and not for the cause at all. We are still destroying the planet that was entrusted to us and its environment. We still close our eyes to the growing social, ethnic and cultural conflicts in the world. From time to time, we say that the anonymous megamachinery we have created for ourselves no longer serves us but rather has enslaved us, yet we still fail to do anything about it.

In other words, we still don’t know how to put morality ahead of politics, science and economics. We are still incapable of understanding that the only genuine backbone of all our actions, if they are to be moral, is responsibility.

Responsibility to something higher than my family, my country, my company, my success -- responsibility to the order of being where all our actions are indelibly recorded and where and only where they will be properly judged.

The interpreter or mediator between us and this higher authority is what is traditionally referred to as human conscience.

If I subordinate my political behavior to this imperative, mediated to me by my conscience, I can’t go far wrong. If, on the contrary, I were not guided by this voice, not even 10 presidential schools with 2,000 of the best political scientists in the world could help me.

This is why I ultimately decided, after resisting for a long time, to accept the burden of political responsibility.

I am not the first, nor will I be the last, intellectual to do this. On the contrary, my feeling is that there will be more and more of them all the time. If the hope of the world lies in human consciousness, then it is obvious that intellectuals cannot go on forever avoiding their share of responsibility for the world and hiding their distaste for politics under an alleged need to be independent.

It is easy to have independence in your program and then leave others to carry that program out. If everyone thought that way, pretty soon no one would be independent.

I think that you Americans should understand this way of thinking. Wasn’t it the best minds of your country, people you could call intellectuals, who wrote your famous Declaration of Independence, your bill of human rights and your Constitution and who, above all, took upon themselves practical responsibility for putting them into practice? The worker from Branik in Prague that your president referred to in his State of the Union message this year is far from being the only person in Czechoslovakia, let alone in the world, to be inspired by those great documents. They inspire us all; they inspire us despite the fact that they are over 200 years old. They inspire us to be citizens.

When Thomas Jefferson wrote that “governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” it was a simple and important act of the human spirit. What gave meaning to that act, however, was the fact that the author backed it up with his life. It was not just his words; it was his deeds as well.

I will end where I began: History has accelerated. I believe that once again it will be the human mind that will notice this acceleration, give it a name and transform those words into deeds.

Thank you.

Here is a link to the entire speech: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1990/02/22/text-of-havels-speech-to-congress/df98e177-778e-4c26-bd96-980089c4fcb2/

If you have a moment, please take the time to read his 1978 essay, “The Power of the Powerless” https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/wp-content/uploads/1979/01/the-power-of-the-powerless.pdf

Thanks for reading A Native Son! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Weekly Wrap Up - April 17, 2026

Eddie — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 21:12:28 GMT

Summary

In this Weekly Wrap Up, Eddie highlights the fragile ceasefires in Lebanon and Iran while mourning the staggering death toll of women and girls in Gaza. He fiercely criticizes President Trump’s denial of the war’s economic fallout, his unprecedented feud with Pope Leo XIV, and a proposed 2027 federal budget that slashes domestic funding to inflate defense spending by 40%. Eddie concludes by urging a national moral revival to reclaim basic human decency in the face of escalating cruelty.

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Middle East & Global Conflict

Vatican Tensions & Religious Rhetoric

Immigration & Law Enforcement

Federal Budget & Supreme Court

Domestic News

Justin Fairfax Murder-Suicide

Our Moral Crisis

Eddie — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 17:42:49 GMT

We find ourselves facing a serious political crisis in this country. But this crisis cuts deeper than the nonsense of politicians and the absurdity of what is going on in Washington, D.C. To be sure, Donald Trump is a serious problem. But he isn’t the problem. Ours is a deep moral crisis – where our way of life has been overrun by selfishness, greed, and hatred, and calloused hearts (made possible by that way of life) have seized the reins of power.

In many ways, what we are experiencing is unprecedented and, in many ways, it is wholly familiar. The country has had to grapple with the madness at its heart since the founding. America imagines itself, at once, as a beacon of freedom and as a white Republic. The two views cannot be held together without contradiction, and the result has distorted and disfigured not only the polity but the people who claim freedom as their possession and theirs alone. This heresy sits at the heart of the American project.

I think this account offers a general framing of the malaise of our current days. Anti-democratic forces have always threatened to overwhelm democracy in this place. If we are honest, we would have to admit that we have only been a democracy since 1965, and barely then. But despite that reality, or perhaps because of it, we have abundant examples of people speaking back, of ordinary people striking the blow for freedom by risking everything for a more just order. In short, we have a vast tradition of counter examples of how to respond to the moral crises that have threatened this place, over and over again.

From the Stono Rebellion in 1739 to the extraordinary courage of people in the twin cities, we see the audacity to refuse consent – to stand up to authoritarian forces that seek to make us cower in fear and to stand by silently and be complicit, in that silence, to the evils of our day.

I certainly don’t want to minimize the uniqueness of our political and moral crisis today. And I certainly don’t want to obscure the particular features of this iteration of authoritarianism in this country. I understand the rhetorical utility of phrases like the “afterlife of slavery” and “the new Jim Crow,” but I always want to be mindful of the innovations and distinctive forms of new regimes of racist power. I want to keep track of the shifts that come with certain victories in struggle, no matter how fleeting those victories may be (We are not slaves, and that matters. And the formal system of Jim Crow has been dismantled even as we acknowledge the residual traces of its logics).

That said, we can still draw on the past, as funded experience (to use the language of John Dewey), that will allow us to address the problems of our time with a bit more than luck. Lessons learned, experiences had, traditions and methods come to us as tools in our efforts to address the crises we confront. When we look back to past struggles, what we see, among many things, are the traditions/examples that offer a more democratic view of American life – a moral vision that assumes the dignity and standing of human beings – and how they faltered or failed.

Abolitionism, the women’s movement, the labor movement, the Black freedom struggle of the 20^th century, the gay liberation movement, etc. what connects them all – a throughline of sorts – is a refusal to concede to the terms of domination that insists that certain human beings matter more than others.

Each, in their own complicated way, sought to expand the imagination of not only those fighting for a more just America, but of those committed to an unjust order.

And this is important: the imagination has always been a critical battleground of struggle. To get us to see beyond the constraints of now – to imagine the “as yet” as a form of radical critique of the present order. They wanted people to believe that slavery was natural, that the place of women as the property of men was divinely sanctioned, that race determined the value of life, that surplus value defined the good, and that love could only come in one form. Movements sought to expand the possible, because those committed to domination aimed to constrict and confine what we could imagine. They want us all to look through a glass darkly

One of the important aims of struggle was to offer “the collyrium” to clear the eyes of ordinary people so that we might see the vice and follies that block the way to substantive change—so that we might do the imaginative work of imagining ourselves otherwise.

And it is here that the arts play such an important role. They help provide what the historian Nell Painter called “elbow room” to imagine ourselves differently: the space where the techniques of domination run up against the techniques of self-making.

Of course, song and image can document our times, offer a commentary on our miseries, and fortify the spirit as we ready the self to engage the powers that be. But the power of art is so much more than a reflection of the times, a mirror of our days. Art excites the imagination, which is a critical feature of moral struggle. It works that muscle in the darkest of hours. One can see it at work on the chain gang. Can hear it in the humming of an elderly woman, rocking back and forth, as a memory threatens to flood in. One can see it in the hands of someone who takes discarded pieces of thread, scraps of thrown away items and makes something beautiful. Or, in the language of the poet that erupts out of the mouths of people in unexpected places.

The exercise of that muscle says to the person who may be trapped in the bowels of a slave ship or locked away in an immigration detention center that God is NOT dead, because God speaks to us through our imaginations.

If we are to look to past traditions of struggle, let’s scour them for, among other things, their imaginative work: how they oriented people to the long durée of the fight. How they sought to cultivate the soil for a different kind of human being to emerge on the other side of madness. How they created the elbow room. That work is critically important for our time. Ours is a moral crisis. What is desperately needed is a new humanism, a different way of conceiving of what it means to be human rooted in Imago Dei.

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Weekly Wrap Up - April 10, 2026

Eddie — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 19:09:21 GMT

Summary

In this Weekly Wrap Up, Eddie discusses the temporary 30-day ceasefire in the Israel-Iran war, criticizing President Trump for claiming credit despite the conflict’s devastating human toll. He breaks down a dizzying news cycle, highlighting unprecedented U.S. threats against the Pope, disturbing Epstein revelations allegedly implicating Melania Trump, and the administration’s use of graphic violence to stoke anti-immigrant hatred while dodging blame for war-driven inflation. Confronting the sheer exhaustion of these compounding crises, Eddie urges the community to fight through the fog of chaos and maintain their steadfast moral resistance.

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Middle East & International Conflict

US & Vatican Tensions

Economy & Inflation

Epstein Scandal & Trump Family

Domestic Politics & International Allies

Immigration & Crime Rhetoric

Martin Luther King’s Easter Message

Eddie — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 15:26:53 GMT

All around the world this weekend, Christians celebrated Easter. For them, this holiest of days announces that death does not have the final word and that eternal life awaits those who would just believe.

Saturday also marked the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s death. Fifty-eight years ago, an assassin’s bullet took his life as he struggled to secure the promises of American democracy for the children of slaves. His sacrifice, along with countless others, helped usher in a new chapter in American life – one that is under relentless attack by Donald Trump and those who follow him.

Trump’s administration has set out to destroy the basic governmental infrastructure of civil rights. From the assault on civil rights enforcement, voting rights, birthright citizenship, on American history, to cruel immigration policies, Trump has worked to destroy the legacy of King and to embrace and expound, without shame, the triple evils of racism, militarism, and materialism King denounced at the end of his life.

How might we think about the significance of Easter and the martyrdom of Martin Luther King, Jr. to the lives we currently live as Americans? What lessons does Easter hold for us? And what does remembering King’s death teach us?

On April 27, 1957, Dr. King delivered an Easter sermon titled, “Questions that Easter Answers.” For him, Easter settled the mystery of death and secured for us the importance of living a life in light of those forces that go beyond our physical experience. We are not simply biology, sacs and stomachs as Emerson would say, or mere creatures of the material world. Instead, King argued, Easter cries out to us about the importance of the unseen and of the personality, those “spiritual forces that are eternal and not merely these material things that we look about and see.”

We matter. Our hopes and aspirations, our joys and triumphs matter. Not because of something we have done, but rather, because of an inheritance borne on a cross on Calvary. King understood Easter’s answer to the significance of human action in the world. “There is a faith, there is love, there is hope, there is something beyond the external that will stand through the ages.”

This view holds off the notion that life has no meaning or is doomed to end in shipwreck. The fact that so many have lost their jobs, can barely make ends meet—that we are awash in the evils of our days—confirms for us that life carries with it a ‘Good Friday’ experience. That darkness and disappointment can be constant companions, because the storms are always coming.

“But thank God the crucifixion was not the last act in that great and powerful drama,” King preached. “There is another act. And it is something that we sing out and cry and ring out today. Thank God a day came when Good Friday had to pass.”

For King, Easter teaches us that death does not have the last word; that invisible forces are more real than the shadows that cover our days; and that the darkness of Good Friday may be necessary but will eventually pass away.

Easter ultimately demonstrates that “love is the most powerful force in the universe,” said King. And this insight reaches beyond Christians to all of us, no matter what we believe.

Love isn’t some sentimental notion. It involves risks and a willingness to surrender to that feature of human personality that can cause us to sacrifice our lives in defense of it. Love conquers cowardice. It shatters hubris and crushes the illusions of death. It fortifies the soul amid the darkness of the hour; it calls us to bear witness and to suffer, if necessary, the consequences.

The evil of war and of men (some of whom claim to be the mantle of Christianity) distracts us from the power of love. We are mired in the ugliness of Trumpism and its unrelenting attack on our hearts and spirits. We are soaked in venom.

Easter, if I understand King correctly, teaches us to love and to witness the miracle of the resurrection before the powers that be, no matter the consequences. “It says to us,” King preached, “that love is the most durable power in the world” and is stronger “than all of the military giants, all of the nations that base their way on military power.” Such a conviction led him on April 4, 1967, a year before he was killed, to condemn the Vietnam War and to say that America was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” It still is.

Easter weekend and the anniversary of Dr. King’s death highlight, for me, the true lesson of this holiest of days. We are not to sit idly by because Easter proclaims the victory.

Too many Christians take comfort in the wrong-headed idea that all is settled because Jesus rose from the dead. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s death suggests otherwise. His was a life given in love and in devotion to justice. Are we, Christian or not, as committed? To stopping war? To ending poverty? To fighting for the most vulnerable among us? To refusing the cruelty of Donald Trump and his destruction of decency? Or, are we content to rest in the illusion that salvation is guaranteed and that there is nothing left for us to do?

Our lives, if we are to be saved, must stand as a testament to that legacy which, beyond our doing, is inescapable. Cowardice and complicity must die in us. And we must rise again to love a new world into existence.

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Weekly Wrap Up - April 3, 2026

Eddie — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 18:27:20 GMT

Summary

In this Weekly Wrap Up, Eddie condemns President Trump’s threat to bomb Iran and denounces the broader international cruelty seen in Lebanon, Gaza, and the U.S. blockade of Cuba. Domestically, he rebukes the administration for a looming Homeland Security shutdown, ongoing voter suppression efforts, and attacks on birthright citizenship. Citing the U.S.’s shocking refusal to back a UN resolution declaring slavery a crime against humanity as a profound moral failure, Eddie urges the A Native Son Community to actively resist these compounding threats to human dignity.

*Correction: Countries that voted against the UN resolution recognizing the transatlantic slave trade as the “gravest crime against humanity” were the United States, Israel, and Argentina.

**Video sharpens ~06m:33s

Continue Reading…

Middle East & Israel

Iran War & Trump’s Address

Cuba Crisis

Supreme Court & Homeland Security

Domestic Issues & Public Health

The White Problem

Eddie — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 14:03:26 GMT

I am teaching my James Baldwin seminar this semester, and this week we are reading selections of his writings from Randall Kenan’s edited volume, The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings. I love this book. The fugitive short pieces give the reader a sense of Baldwin’s capacious mind, the arc of his thinking across time, and the power not only of his prose writing, but of his speeches. The cadence and rhythm of a young preacher jump off the page. And I shout and write, “Yes!”

No matter how many times I have read the book, I always linger on his 1964 essay, “The White Problem,” published in the book, 100 Years of Emancipation. Baldwin writes:

The people who settled the country had a fatal flaw. They could recognize a man when they saw one. They knew he wasn’t—I mean you can tell, they knew he wasn’t—anything else but a man; but since they were Christian, and since they had already decided that they came here to establish a free country, the only way to justify the role this chattel was playing in one’s life was to say that he was not a man. For if he wasn’t a man, then no crime had been committed. That lie is the basis of our present trouble.

That lie, in a way, is the source of American “freedom” and our suffering. Those who made their way to these shores came to believe that safety and security could be found in accepting the idea that their white skin made them superior and the owners of freedom – that fact alone secured their fortunes and justified their role as flesh jobbers.

An obedience to the lie became a crucial feature of the American project, one that promised to all who believed it that the country and its bounty would forever belong to them. The price, ironically, would be freedom itself. The lie would become the source of our suffering.

Think about the moment in the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov as the Cardinal explains the meaning of Satan’s first temptation in the desert. Christ was wrong to refuse to turn the stones into bread, he declares. Obedience and a sense of safety and comfort are worth more, especially for the weak and the depraved, than the burden of freedom. “Better that you enslave us, but feed us,” they will shout. The Church provides that longed-for sense of security, but the price is obedience. Cardinal Grand Inquisitor says, “we shall deceive them again…. This deceit will constitute our suffering, for we shall have to lie.”

We now drown in lies not so much to protect our innocence, as Americans once did. Baldwin wrote in The Fire Next Time, around the same time he wrote “The White Problem,” that “it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.” But Donald Trump makes it hard, if not impossible, to believe in American innocence or in the fantasy of American goodness as bombs drop on Iran, a blockade starves the Cuban people, the United States explicitly bullies the world, and so many white people rage and rant. In fact, Trump casts away the need to mask American power in innocence. To pretend is weakness, he believes. Instead, the lies are in the service of power and nothing else. And we suffer, still.

In “The White Problem,” Baldwin noted that “in this extraordinary endeavor to create the country called America, a great many crimes were committed.” And crimes continue to be committed in our name. But he goes on to say,

I want to make it absolutely clear, or as clear as I can, that I understand perfectly well that crime is universal and as old as mankind, and I trust, therefore, that no one will assume that I am indicting or accusing. I’m not any longer interested in the crime. People treat each other badly and always have and very probably always will. I’m not talking about the crime, I’m talking about denying what one does. This is a much more sinister matter.

Americans retreat into myths and fantasies – into lies – to evade what history corroborates and what the present, without blinders, reveals. Trump feeds us lies. He would have us believe that he can turn stone into bread (when it is just days-old bread pretending to be stone – no miracles here). He announces with every word and deed that, like the Cardinal Grand Inquisitor, he is “not with you, but with him, that is our secret!”

But the price of that secret, the price of his lies, entails a corruption of the soul. That is the sinister matter. Repeatedly denying what one does, what one has done, makes you monstrous: it is the loss of all human feeling – you can do anything to anybody at any time, and not give a damn.

Millions of Americans gathered in the streets this weekend to refuse the lies. They marched and protested Trump’s assault on American freedoms and democracy itself. I want to believe, even with the skyrocketing cost of bread, that we do not live by bread alone: that we will continue to fight those who demand obedience and who sell the idea that freedom and its material bounty can be found in the privilege of being white.

I pray that we will continue to fight those who live “the vindictiveness of the guilty” and who believe that, in the end, white America will give up everything for the comfort and safety of a lie.

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Weekly Wrap Up - March 27, 2026

Eddie — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 18:29:18 GMT

Summary

In this Weekly Wrap Up, Eddie condemns the escalating conflicts in the Middle East and the devastating blockade on Cuba. Domestically, he rebukes the Trump administration for holding TSA pay hostage, pushing voter suppression via the SAVE Act, and dismantling the Department of Education. Framing these compounding crises as a profound moral plague, Eddie urges us all to join the upcoming nationwide "No Kings" protests as a vital act of resistance.

Continue Reading…

Middle East & International Law

Iran War & Global Economy

Cuba Blockade & Diplomacy

Domestic Politics & Federal Funding

Elections & Investigations

Administration Actions & Protests

Death of the Heart

Eddie — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 18:30:55 GMT

Former FBI director and special counsel, Robert Mueller died at the age of 81. In response, President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social:

The post has ignited a firestorm. Trump spewed venom in response to the death of someone widely considered a patriot when he could have easily remained silent.

Basic decency dictates that one should know better: that home training would tell him to keep his mouth shut. But Donald Trump has demonstrated repeatedly his narcissism. That his character has been malformed and the only thing that matters to him is what he feels and what he wants. His is a kind of selfishness that is all consuming. Even grief has no quarter to breathe.

We shouldn’t be surprised. Over and over again, the president of the United States has revealed himself to be an amoral troglodyte. And no matter the poll numbers that suggest most of the American people disagree with his policy positions on the Iran war, on immigration, and his ongoing destruction of the economy, we all remain, whether we agree with it or not, awash in his deadly assault on the heart of the nation.

One doesn’t have to believe in the fantasy of American innocence or in an American Eden to feel the effects of Trump’s moral depravity. He is a product of this place, a concentrated version of its jingoism, its greed, and selfishness. Trump works as an accelerant in a diseased body. His presence makes the ugliness in our national bloodstream felt and known. Moral lethargy. A signal of the assault on the internal organs of the country. A sense of an inevitable end.

We know, if our eyes are open, what we see. Trumpism has attacked the basic institutions of our democracy. What Steven Bannon described as “the destruction of the administrative state” has extended beyond the adolescent and self-serving work of DOGE. Department of State gutted. Department of Justice corrupted. Department of Education disappeared. Congress dysfunctional. The Supreme Court captured. Oligarchs gobbling up the fourth estate and its adjacent platforms while the war machine rages on, and the super-rich keep getting richer.

But what Donald Trump and his supporters are doing cuts deeper than politics and political institutions. They have released a plague on the land—with fear, immorality, and indifference as its contagion.

Its aim, and I can think of no other way to say this, is the death of the heart: to empty us of any moral concern, to make of human freedom what we have made of the so-called choice between hundreds of channels of entertaining banality that dim the senses. To make us moral monsters.

Donald Trump’s post about Robert Mueller crystallizes the depth of the moral crisis that engulfs the country in its 250^th year. The President of the United States responded to the death of another human being who dedicated his life to the idea of America with the words, “Good. I’m glad he is dead.” And we should note those who liked the post, who “retruthed” it, who nodded their heads in the quiet isolation of their homes.

I am reminded of Matthew 13:15: For this people’s heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes. Otherwise, they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them.

Resistance demands more than voting for Democrats in the midterm, although we must do that. This moral assault requires, in addition to politics, a moral defense of the heart—to open our eyes, to see and feel, and to fight for the humanity that struggles to breathe.

Weekly Wrap Up - March 20, 2026

Eddie — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 18:30:36 GMT

Summary

In this Weekly Wrap Up, Eddie confronts the intersecting crises of international violence, systemic corruption, and rising domestic authoritarianism. He condemns the resumed Israeli strikes in Gaza and the moral rot exposed by the newly released Epstein files implicating powerful figures like Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Eddie also warns of an escalating assault on civil rights and democracy, pointing to cruel ICE deployments, threats to use the military at 2026 polling sites, and the administration’s active erasure of Black history. He concludes by urging listeners to remain vigilant and organized against these coordinated attacks on fundamental freedoms.

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My Love of Books

Eddie — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 14:47:08 GMT

I love books, and I always have. When I was 10 or 12 years old, I can’t remember the exact year, I hid beneath my bed to finish reading Terry Brooks’s The Sword of Shannara. No one could find me. I was lost in a world of wizards, elves, and quests. It was magical, my preadolescent sublime.

I think I may have loved the fact that the book was over 700 pages as much as I liked the story. I loved how “thick” it was, how it felt in my hands, and how the book bent differently as I read more of it (as if I had earned its trust and it opened for me). When I finally finished it, I felt a sense of accomplishment. A world had been revealed to me and I submitted to it. I felt larger and more expansive, and Moss Point became a little smaller. How could the mundane life of this small gulf coast town compare to the dark forces bearing down on the Four Lands?

A love affair with books had begun.

I recently attended the New Orleans Book Festival. The tag line of the festival is “a Mardi Gras for the mind.” Books were everywhere. Panels, conversations, great company along with wonderful weather and the spirit of New Orleans made the days pass by too quickly. I didn’t do it but imagine me second-lining with a book in hand, smiling, as the folks back home would say, like a “chess cat.” I was in my happy place. Surrounded by books, talking about books, and meeting interesting people who loved books, too.

Of course, the horrors of the times cast shadows. Wars, elections, Trump. Earnest exchanges and explanations filled rooms, but those conversations did not overwhelm. And even when they did, I still had the comforting presence of books—a reminder of a place of retreat like the clandestine space underneath my bed in a room wallpapered with airplanes where my imagination soared.

I think this is why I love to surround myself with books. A portable haven, of sorts. I want books around me. I want to lay eyes on the covers. I want to be able to randomly pick one up and to return to something I have already read.

In primary school we had these reading competitions. You would list all the books you had read over a certain period. I would write down every title—the books I read, the books I was going to read, the books I wanted to read but couldn’t buy. My classmates would say, accusingly, that I hadn’t read all those books. I would shrug my shoulders. It didn’t matter. I was collecting and curating. I guess it was a foreshadow of what was to come.

When I was a graduate student at Princeton, I remember walking into Cornel West’s office and books were everywhere. They poured out of the walls and surrounded his desk as if they had a life of their own. He turned the covers of particular books around to face you. You had this amazing juxtaposition: the vastness of Cornel’s mind and personality along with the images of his favorite thinkers and favorite books. Stepping into the office was like stepping into a sanctuary. Sacred space. Imagine. Every wall covered with books from floor to ceiling. All of them dog eared, neatly annotated with his felt-tip pen, and underlined passages with his signature exclamation points.

Once, and I doubt he remembers this, Cornel wanted to show me a book while we talked in his cramped office in Dickinson Hall. I believe it was by Hubert Harrison, but I might be wrong. As you get older, your memories often betray you. You grab hold of what you can and treasure the fragments anyway. He couldn’t immediately find the book. It was somewhere on the bottom shelf of his office library. He got on all fours. I bent down beside him and we looked around. “There it is!” he said with excitement. He smiled that beautiful gap-tooth smile, and he opened the book to the passage he wanted me to see. I don’t remember what he read. And it really doesn’t matter. We dwelled among his books—that book, and that felt like a piece of heaven on earth.

Not all of my books are dog-eared and annotated, and I am ok with that. Thanks to friends in a reading group, I came across this word, tsundoku, a Japanese practice of buying books and letting them pile up. It’s a wonderful way of accounting for my habit of ordering books, roaming bookstores, and buying books that I probably won’t read immediately. Books that catch the eye. Works that will, one day, perhaps, find their way into my hands. Shelves of potential reading. Signs of taste evolving, of something in me changing. Books in waiting. Me, becoming.

I have to teach James Baldwin’s The Evidence of Things Not Seen this week. I have read the book more times than I can remember. My annotations are layered like thick paint on a canvas, impasto style. Each time something new jumps off the page. Each time I wonder what I was thinking when I wrote whatever I wrote in the margins that now makes little sense to me.

Of course, life colors the eyes. A lot has happened between the readings of the book not only in the world, but in my experience with other books. American bombs fall yet again. I just finished Min Jin Lee’s latest novel (it is brilliant) and Dalmon Galgut’s The Promise (it is brilliant, too). So, my eyes and ears are attuned a bit differently to what Baldwin is up to with form.

I love that about books. They are like little universes where time folds in on itself. Literary cosmic origami.

Eventually, on that day hidden from everyone, I had to come out of my make-shift cave. After finishing Terry Brooks’s book in the dim light underneath my bed, I had a terrible headache. I cried as I told my mom. “Nobody told you to read all them pages in the dark,” she said with a slight smile that betrayed her tone as she reached for aspirin. She was right. Nobody told me. No one needs to tell me, still. Books are my happy place.

Maybe I will pull Brooks off the shelf and read him again. I am 57 now. What will that world read like with these eyes?

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Weekly Wrap Up - March 13, 2026

Eddie — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 17:41:05 GMT

Summary

In this Weekly Wrap Up, Eddie strongly condemns the U.S. war in Iran, calling out the administration’s refusal to take responsibility for a devastating school bombing that killed over 170 people. He contrasts the estimated $1 billion daily cost of the conflict with profound domestic crises, noting that while the government funds war, one-third of Americans are skipping meals to afford healthcare and millions face cuts to nutritional assistance. He argues these skewed priorities expose a deep “moral rot” at the heart of the nation. Eddie concludes by urging his audience to combat feelings of powerlessness through expanded acts of civic refusal and resistance.

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The Bulwark

Lindsey Graham Wants Trump to Attack Cuba and Lebanon Next

Sam Stein and Will Saletan give their takes on why Lindsey Graham is suddenly everywhere celebrating the escalation against Iran and why even some Republicans are alarmed by his rhetoric. As Graham cheers the bombing campaign and openly talks about taking on other regimes around the world, critics including Meghan McCain warn that his messaging is scaring voters and pushing the U.S. toward endless wars. Sam and Will trace Graham’s long obsession with regime change, how he’s learned to appeal to Donald Trump, and why this moment may represent the culmination of a decades-long foreign policy vision…

Listen now

2 months ago · 374 likes · 94 comments · Sam Stein and Will Saletan

Paris in Spring

Eddie — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 13:59:54 GMT

I had an opportunity to visit Paris over the last couple of days. It was beautiful. The sun shined, and the weather hinted at the coming of spring. People walked the streets without heavy coats, they mingled in cafes, and the first sight of flowers in bloom gave a glimpse of the colors to come.

Thanks to Rodney Priestly, the dean of Princeton’s graduate school, I was invited to deliver a lecture for Princeton alumni in Paris celebrating the 125th anniversary of the school at the École Normale Superieure. I am still full of wonder when I come to the city of lights. Amazed that a country boy from Mississippi gets the chance to walk around Paris, to be unburdened by the realities that menace me in this country and to allow myself, if for a moment, to take in the romance of a place with, to say the least, a complicated history.

Paris in spring. I never imagined such an experience growing up on the gulf coast with its saltwater air and the accents that roll off the tongue rarely mistaken as a language of love.

But this time in Paris felt different. As I stepped off the plane, a weight fell off my shoulders. I do not mean by this some sense of weightlessness as Milan Kundera meant it, but something akin to lightness without leaving behind responsibility. A reprieve from the madness of American politics. Not so much from the reality of it all, but relief from the weight of a required witness, the absence of a feeling of dread that makes the blood thick and heavy.

Of course, the war with Iran was all over the news in Paris. I found myself at times doom scrolling. Searching and sorting for information about what was happening. Reading about the dead American soldiers returning home. Seeing images of Trump in his blue suit and red tie and white baseball cap with USA emblazoned with gold letters, as he stood tall while the coffins of dead soldiers passed him by, wondering if this man has any sense of decency at all. Does he even know how to grieve or does he even care?

But these moments were fleeting. They didn’t weigh my shoulders down as they do at home.

There is a cost to living daily with madness. Americans already experience the burden of growing old in a society that requires a daily grind. Life gets reduced to the manic pursuit of success and security. Many Americans are barely keeping their noses above water. Worried about bills, they try to raise their children. They work hard to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. Panic-stricken about getting sick and worried about taking care of aging loved ones.

Many are failing no matter how hard they try as they watch the super-rich hoard and rig the rules.

Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about the melancholy that soaks this place. That those who fail here amid the illusion of unbounded abundance experience the weight of their failures differently.

Among democratic nations, men easily attain a certain equality of condition, but they can never attain as much as they desire…. At every moment they think they are about to grasp it; it escapes at every moment from their hold. They are near enough to see its charms, but too far off to enjoy them; and before they have fully tasted its delights, they die.

That is the reason for the strange melancholy that haunts inhabitants of democratic countries in the midst of abundance.

To work hard and fail here sours everything. The gift of life, with its constant toil and disappointment, feels like God’s punishment for something we have done.

Americans are siloed. Locked in their terrors. Melancholy and loneliness shadow our steps. Fantasy and illusion become our safe house.

Isolated and tired of the grind we try to find moments amid it all to smile, laugh, love and to find joy. But it is hard, especially when the leader of the country demands your attention like a rotten child. 24-hour news cycles cover him and his doings. Algorithms keep us enraged. We drown in lies and grift. All of it, along with the persistent demand to consume and to achieve, assault our attention.

As Marvin Gaye sang, “It makes you want to holler and throw up my hands.”

For a few days, with the hint of a Paris spring, I was able to breathe outside of the pressure cooker that is America, U.S.A. I turned my attention to the country, my country, from another place, and saw the sickness that consumes. I needed the distance, a moment of reprieve to catch my breath, because the weight of America, in this hour, sits on my chest like a forged-steel anvil.

I am back. The bombs explode, still. Politicians lie and grift, still. All of it grinds the spirit. And we all keep grinding daily because that is the American way. The blood thickens. The shoulders feel heavy, again. We are all so tired. Bone tired.

You must snatch a moment, no matter how you do it, to take a break from this. To be sure, we cannot ignore what is happening around us. That would be a sin against the Holy Ghost. But we don’t have to give ourselves over to it. We do not have to be consumed by the lies and the hatred, the cruelty and the death. Refuse. Draw the line and scream, No. No. No!

And, just maybe, that personal refusal can ground the possibility of a political refusal: that we simply don’t want to live like this anymore.

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Weekly Wrap Up - March 6, 2026

Eddie — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 18:06:27 GMT

Summary

In this Weekly Wrap Up, Eddie focuses heavily on what he views as a profound moral crisis in the United States, driven by the escalating conflict with Iran. He strongly condemns the actions of the Trump administration, specifically citing the rhetoric of Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio, arguing they are leading the nation into an unjustified and deadly war. He connects this current military action to a broader “moral rot” and an “avalanche of lies” that are fostering a deep sense of powerlessness and distrust among the American public, drawing a parallel to the disillusionment experienced by youth during the Vietnam War era. He concludes with a call for imaginative resistance and a refusal to passively accept the current state of affairs, urging people of faith and the general public to push back against the greed, arrogance, and hatred that he believes are currently steering the country.

Continue Reading…

BEYOND VIETNAM: A TIME TO BREAK THE SILENCE

Eddie — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 17:22:24 GMT

My heart is heavy. America is at war again. Men and women will die following the orders of a man who has not earned our trust—following someone who knows little to nothing about personal sacrifice for the greater good. Selfishness and greed are his compass. But the bloodlust goes beyond Donald Trump. America has been at war for a long time, at war with perceived enemies and with itself.

I am not interested in debating the particulars or framing the implications of the war in light of the upcoming elections in November. People are dying. And more innocents will join them. We are all in danger.

There is a moral rot at the center of this nation. Trump reflects it. And it seems to me, in this dark hour in the 250^th year of the country, we need to confront that rot honestly and understand its moral implications. These people don’t care about ordinary Americans. They don’t care that people are struggling to make ends meet; that healthcare costs are skyrocketing; that work is disappearing like faded memories; that people are tired of war, tired of mourning their dead.

What they value is clear: blood money and power. They are moral monsters. And they are content to feed the American people lies and illusions of safety that can lead to the death of the heart.

I have posted a transcript of Dr. King’s Beyond Vietnam speech delivered on April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church, exactly one year before he was assassinated. Read it. Feel it. Understand the choice he urged us to make and the choice we must make in our own hour.

(Transcription from American Rhetoric: Top 100 Speeches https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm

Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen:

I need not pause to say how very delighted I am to be here tonight, and how very delighted I am to see you expressing your concern about the issues that will be discussed tonight by turning out in such large numbers. I also want to say that I consider it a great honor to share this program with Dr. Bennett, Dr. Commager, and Rabbi Heschel, and some of the distinguished leaders and personalities of our nation. And of course it’s always good to come back to Riverside church. Over the last eight years, I have had the privilege of preaching here almost every year in that period, and it is always a rich and rewarding experience to come to this great church and this great pulpit.

I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join you in this meeting because I’m in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam. The recent statements of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart, and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” And that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.

The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexing as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.

And some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation’s history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movements and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.

Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: “Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King?” “Why are you joining the voices of dissent?” “Peace and civil rights don’t mix,” they say. “Aren’t you hurting the cause of your people,” they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.

In the light of such tragic misunderstanding, I deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly, and I trust concisely, why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church -- the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate -- leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.

I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia. Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they must play in the successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reasons to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides.

Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the National Liberation Front, but rather to my fellow Americans.

Since I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So, I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. And so we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. And so we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

For those who ask the question, “Aren’t you a civil rights leader?” and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: “To save the soul of America.” We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself until the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath --
America will be!

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be -- are -- are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.

As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1954;¹ and I cannot forget that the Nobel Peace Prize was also a commission, a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for “the brotherhood of man.” This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I’m speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men -- for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative?

Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the One who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the Vietcong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this One? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?

And finally, as I try to explain for you and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to this place I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood, and because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially for his suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them.

This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation’s self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls “enemy,” for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the ideologies of the Liberation Front, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries.

They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1954 -- in 1945 rather -- after a combined French and Japanese occupation and before the communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony. Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not ready for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination and a government that had been established not by China -- for whom the Vietnamese have no great love -- but by clearly indigenous forces that included some communists. For the peasants this new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.

For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam. Before the end of the war we were meeting eighty percent of the French war costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of their reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will. Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at recolonization.

After the French were defeated, it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva Agreement. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators, our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly rooted out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords, and refused even to discuss reunification with the North. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by United States’ influence and then by increasing numbers of United States troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem’s methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictators seemed to offer no real change, especially in terms of their need for land and peace.

The only change came from America, as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and received the regular promises of peace and democracy and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs.

So they go, primarily women and children and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.

What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?

We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing -- in the crushing of the nation’s only non-Communist revolutionary political force, the unified Buddhist Church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men.

Now there is little left to build on, save bitterness. Soon, the only solid -- solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call “fortified hamlets.” The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these. Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These, too, are our brothers.

Perhaps a more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National Liberation Front, that strangely anonymous group we call “VC” or “communists”? What must they think of the United States of America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem, which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the South? What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of “aggression from the North” as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings, even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts.

How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than twenty-five percent communist, and yet insist on giving them the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam, and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel government will not have a part? They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them, the only party in real touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant. Is our nation planning to build on political myth again, and then shore it up upon the power of new violence?

Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.

So, too, with Hanoi. In the North, where our bombs now pummel the land, and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western words, and especially their distrust of American intentions now. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the French Commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness of the colonial armies. It was they who led a second struggle against French domination at tremendous costs, and then were persuaded to give up the land they controlled between the thirteenth and seventeenth parallel as a temporary measure at Geneva. After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which could have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed again. When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered.

Also, it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence of American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been the initial military breach of the Geneva Agreement concerning foreign troops. They remind us that they did not begin to send troops in large numbers and even supplies into the South until American forces had moved into the tens of thousands.

Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has surely heard the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the North. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor, weak nation more than eight hundred -- rather, eight thousand miles away from its shores.

At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called “enemy,” I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor.

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak of the -- for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.

This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words, and I quote:

Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom, and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism (unquote).

If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately, the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horrible, clumsy, and deadly game we have decided to play. The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways. In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war.

I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do [immediately] to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish conflict:

Number one: End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.

Number two: Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation.

Three: Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our interference in Laos.

Four: Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and any future Vietnam government.

Five: Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva Agreement.

Part of our ongoing -- Part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new regime which included the Liberation Front. Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. We must provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in this country, if necessary. Meanwhile -- Meanwhile, we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must continue to raise our voices and our lives if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative method of protest possible.

As we counsel young men concerning military service, we must clarify for them our nation’s role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. I am pleased to say that this is a path now chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover, I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.

Now there is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter that struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing.

The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality...and if we ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing “clergy and laymen concerned” committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala -- Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end, unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy.

And so, such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.

In 1957, a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years, we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which has now justified the presence of U.S. military advisors in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why American napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru.

It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin...we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and, through their misguided passions, urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not engage in a negative anticommunism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action on behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity, and injustice, which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. “The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light.”² We in the West must support these revolutions.

It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch antirevolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has a revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores, and thereby speed the day when “every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain.”³

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.

This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing -- embracing and unconditional love for all mankind. This oft misunderstood, this oft misinterpreted concept, so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate -- ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John: “Let us love one another, for love is God. And every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love.” “If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us.”⁴ Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day.

We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. And history is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says:

Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word (unquote).

We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood -- it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, “Too late.” There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: “The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on.”

We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message -- of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.

As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently stated:

Once to every man and nation comes a moment to decide,
In the strife of truth and Falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God’s new Messiah offering each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever ‘twixt that darkness and that light.
Though the cause of evil prosper, yet ‘tis truth alone is strong
Though her portions be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

And if we will only make the right choice, we will be able to transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of peace. If we will make the right choice, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. If we will but make the right choice, we will be able to speed up the day, all over America and all over the world, when “justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”⁵

¹ King stated “1954.” That year was notable for the Civil Rights Movement in the USSC’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling. However, given the statement’s discursive thrust, King may have meant to say “1964” -- the year he won the Nobel Peace Prize. Alternatively, as noted by Steve Goldberg, King may have identified 1954’s “burden of responsibility” as the year he became a minister.

²Isaiah 9:2/Matthew 4:16

³Isaiah 40:4

⁴ 1 John 4:7-8, 12

⁵Amos 5:24

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