An excellent and timely perspective on the current state of our nation’s state of justice and equality, or lack of it, and their causes. It is especially poignant to me as I have just returned from Memphis actually, including a visit to the National Civil Rights Museum, located at the Lorraine Motel, site of the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. I don’t think I was prepared for the effect that being there would actually have on me. The awareness of the depth of commitment and level of sacrifice to the struggle for basic rights is something I’m afraid is foreign to too many Americans these days. Of course, the fact that majorities of people were often opposed to the civil rights struggle from before the end of slavery up to the murder of MLK, Jr., is a fact that should give us pause about our own self-awareness of the conditions of our society today.

One of the disturbing aspects of the museum, however, was the fancy display wall of high level financial donors to the facility, and the monikers they would give to them by category. When a company like ExxonMobil is labeled as a “Liberator”, you know we are truly colonized by the Corporate State and that ‘The Dream’ is in some serious jeopardy.

Martin Luther King Jr. is held in precious memory because he made an alternative world seem possible. He spoke of a dream, but he mobilized a pragmatic program for change. Idealism, in his terms, was the height of realism. Thus, healing between races, the lifting up of the socially downtrodden, and the amelioration of all that made for violence were not three items on King’s agenda, but one human project.

We honor King today not as a way of recalling the past, but as a way of resuming his campaign in the present. A dream, yes. But equally a three-sided political movement. No racial justice without economic justice! No justice, period, without peace!

Now if we can only work to manifest a similar organized action on behalf of asserting people’s rights over the usurpation of those same rights by ruling elites hiding behind the fictional veil of ‘corporate personhood.’ This represents another use of the law by the modern Corporatocracy to sublimate people’s rights, egregious as was the use of law to keep people slaves during the time of the Slaveocracy,

Read James Carroll’s complete essay Here