Pinch me!

It’s a pinch-myself morning. Perhaps you’ve felt it too.

President-elect Barack Obama.

We’ve seen Obama give election night victory speeches so many times in this long campaign that last night’s simply fell into the slot. I had become conditioned to thinking “so it’s on to North Carolina or Nevada or the next election.”

But no — and I actually had to set my mind straight —this time it’s on to the White House. There won’t be any more elections in 2008.

President-elect Barack Obama.

When will it really sink in? When I stop visiting fivethirtyeight.com? When Obama begins to announce his cabinet? When he meets with Bush at the White House?

On Inauguration Day, which can’t come soon enough?

Of course the other “pinch-me” is that Barack Obama is an African-American.

What that means to American blacks, what if feels like to them, I can only imagine. Each will experience the Obama presidency differently. African Americans are as different one from another as white Americans are.

What they share is racial discrimination. Obama and his candidacy swept racial discrimination aside, at least in national politics. His presidency will do much to sweep it aside in our culture.

But we need to put the Obama victory, America’s victory, in context. It might never have happened without the disastrous, shameful Bush administration and the perilous economic times it has created.

Nor should we for a moment think that racial discrimination disappeared on Nov. 4, 2008. Discrimination, of all kinds, has been slowly, almost imperceptibly, dimming for the past five decades. Yesterday it dimmed noticeably, but it has not gone out.

In 1964, when Barack Obama was two years old, I was in Mississippi as part of a mass movement of young blacks and whites working to secure the vote for African Americans. I never thought that within my lifetime I would see those votes help elect an African-American president.

But who knows what it takes to aspire to the presidency of the United States? In Mississippi, our movement was a magnet for black leadership. James Farmer, Bob Moses, Andrew Young, John Lewis, Fanny Lou Hamer. While Martin Luther King, Jr. never came to Mississippi in my time there, he was the pre-eminent guiding figure.

Today his message and story is enshrined in our history.

Did any of these leaders aspire to be president? Could they see the way to lead the nation from the pinnacle of government? Forty-four years ago, could they have imagined this day would come so soon?

I doubt it. (I would love to put that question to Young, Lewis and Moses, who are still alive)

The other figure that inspired my generation was John Kennedy, whose grace and mastery of the language are legend.

I see and hear and feel King and Kennedy in a composed, eloquent, youthful Barack Obama. In the cock of his head, in the cadence of his words, in the over-arching righteousness of his passionate message ….

And I pinch myself. Could it be?

Martin Luther King, Jr. and the social gospel

If you weren't in the mall today for the "Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Sale," you may have been lured by the media to wallow in notions of King the "dreamer."

Forget them.

As those of us old enough to remember him know, King was no dreamer. He was a truth teller who aimed his words directly at the powerful. Today, his words speak volumes to us, and to those in power and those who seek it.

Pay heed.

Below is an excerpt from a fervent social gospel he delivered on April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in New York City, just a year before he was assassinated. The full text, which focused on the outrage that was the Vietnam War, can be found here.

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 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, 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 is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice that 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 Latin 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 hands 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 veins of people 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.

An avenue named “Justice,” a road named “Freedom”

I got a phone call the other day from one of the proponents of renaming Interstate Avenue for Cesar Chavez.

Apparently defeated in North Portland, the renamers were looking at Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway as a thoroughfare to honor Chavez.

I was cool to the idea.

First — but, as you will see, not foremost — is that “Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway” has been a modest plus in Hillsdale’s effort to establish its identity. Ungainly yes. Misleading, yes (little Hillsdale is hardly a counterbalance to bulked-up Beaverton). But the name literally puts Hillsdale on many maps.

Next — and this is far more significant — history does strange things to the names of our heroes. We celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday as a national holiday, but the King we celebrate each year is a caricature of the King so many of us remember. In the holiday tributes, I, for instance, see only a glimmer of the King who inspired me to go to Mississippi in the spring of 1964 to work on voter registration.

King has become some kind of gauzy, harmless dreamer, thanks to one indelible speech. The King I knew was passionate about justice and change. He was a masterful agent of change who should be remembered for the urgency of our rallying cry, “Freedom Now!”

Today we have Martin Luther King Boulevard, but who associates the name with King’s tenacity, with his moral outrage, with his commitment to non-violence, his struggles for justice, with “Freedom Now!”?

No, we are left with a street of a dreamer.

Chavez is a less well defined figure in American history, partly because his speeches haven’t become part of American lore. He was the champion of the poor and the horribly exploited, specifically those who harvested our food. In November 1960, Edward R. Murrow made a searing documentary called “The Harvest of Shame” about the plight of the farm workers. It should be viewed before each Thanksgiving meal.

Chavez bravely sought to expunge the shame of those harvests. Despite his efforts, we still consume harvests shame. Those Chavez struggled for are now everywhere, still vulnerable to exploitation.

Why shouldn’t we honor Chavez and King — and Gandhi and Mandela, and Susan Anthony and Henry David Thoreau by naming streets and bridges and schools and even entire cities and states after them?

Because their actions and ideals are their legacy. If we truly want to honor them, we should celebrate and perpetuate those deeds and ideals. Unless we can be assured that King and Chavez will be known accurately and well to future generations those street names will become hollow vessels.

Who today knows the Barbur* of Barbur Boulevard? Who knows about the Macadam* of Macadam Avenue? And who 50 years from now will know the Naito of Naito Boulevard?

Yes, there are far better names for Interstate Avenue and Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway. If we change those names, let’s name them for what King and Chavez stood for.

Is that not what they would want?

Honor them and inspire us by changing Union, Interstate, Beaverton-Hillsdale and Macadam to Justice, Dignity, Freedom and Peace.

* Anthony L. Barbur (1861-1941) served 10 years as Portland city auditor and then as commissioner of Public Works for 16 years. (The Oregon History Project)
* Macadam is the name of the mixture of sand, gravel and tar used to pave roads. Macadam Avenue was the first in the city to be surfaced with the mixture.

The political courage to love

The Vietnam vet who confronted me on the streetcar Sunday (see previous post) has led me to a sobering conclusion.

We are one domestic terrorist attack away from electing a war-hardened John McCain as our next president.

Seen this way, the absurdly premature polls now pointing to a Democratic victory in 2008 are numbers from nowhere.

Suppose a terrorist cell, or a solitary suicide bomber (or, perish the thought, an agent provocateur) detonates a bomb in an all-American shopping mall some Saturday in the next 18 months.

Two hundred dead? Four hundred? One thousand gravely wounded. Many victims are children. Depictions of the devastation and agony are delivered again and again to the TVs in every living room in the land.

Baghdad suffers such carnage each day.

Here, once will be enough.

Will a vengeful, flag-waving, self-righteous America then vote for a Clinton/Obama ticket or Obama/Edwards? An Edwards/Richardson pairing? How about Al Gore?

Not a chance.

A “United We Stand” America will send a McCain/Giuliani or a McCain/Brownback war team to the White House.

And the killing goes on and on and on.

The important point is this: The likely winners, like all the candidates in both parties, will be, self-proclaimed “Christians.” Once again, they will be too weak, yes, too cowardly, to put into practice Christ’s most challenging commandment: “Love your enemy.”

As a people we should ask, where do we find leaders with the moral strength and courage to chance such love?

Can our system of government even nurture them? Do we, a frightened people steeped in “might makes right,” bar them from the halls of power? Would we, who venerate a Christ or a Gandhi or a Martin Luther King, ever actually have the courage to elect such a person—to act in the name of love?

I fear that unless we (and here I mean all humanity) quickly evolve so that we vest such leaders with real power, we as a species are doomed.

I don’t think that my streetcar acquaintance had any of this in mind when he challenged me about my service to our country; but this is where his challenge has led me.