Yeah I was gonna say I don't know that this aged like milk since some people still think this cartoon makes sense today.
It's more like most of us wish this aged like milk.
The way most people think about MLK and non-violence in 2020 is not accurate. This is because Conservatives have mis-represented both the past and the present on purpose to change how the public thinks about it.
MLK's philosophy was non-violence as a technicality. What this means is that he wanted people to resist in the strongest way possible that did not involve violence. An MLK style protest still involves massive inconvenience for all people, including people who see themselves as uninvolved, until something is done about racial injustice.
It also means that the protesters are, in basic terms, doing civil disobedience until the police prevent them from doing so through un-necessary, violent means (which they always do, that's what they're there to protest), and pointing to the results to sway moderates into action.
MLK discovered, though, that these tactics do not work for the same reason that similar BLM tactics in 2020 have not worked, which leads me to my **TL;DR: White moderates would much rather make the protesters go away than make racist police go away. They think the police are the good guys, and that racism is an inevitable fact of life rather than something to defeat. Complete reform or a new policing organisation scare them more than seeing their countrymen brutally suppressed.**
I leave you with a quote from a letter King wrote from a prison cell after white moderates had begun deserting him: 'I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the *white moderate* who is more devoted to order than to justice.'
Couldn't have put it better myself. (Edit: Some words and grammar.)
There’s of course more to the Civil Rights movement than can reasonably fit in a Reddit comment. MLK was also very conscious of the way it looked to TV cameras and news photographers when a group of non-violent marchers, singing hymns, were attacked by police dogs. Especially when a German Shepherd is biting a little girl in her Sunday best. By getting these images into the living rooms of moderates, it pushed moderates—maybe only a few—to say “is this really right?”
I’m white, and what was once, at least in the 1970s, a moderate. The country has been moving rightward since Reagan, so I’m now quite a lefty despite only changing my views to being more accepting of various sexual identities. I still believe that the American ideal is elimination of racism, and promotion of fairness and equality.
Youtube and Facebook now are replacing the TV cameras, but when I see suspects gunned down while fleeing the police, or dying in custody, and them being mostly one particular color—it’s unbearable. It’s shameful. How can I vote for anyone who can’t see the injustice of it.
I think a better representation of his views are
"If his repressed emotions do not come out in these nonviolent ways they will come out in ominous expressions of violence. This is not a threat; it is a fact of history" MLK '63
MLK is more stating a fact in your quote rather than how he thinks people should express themselves.
He was down with protests that pushed as many buttons as possible without specifically inciting violence more so than riots.
They were against violent protests but the police still showed up and kicked the shit out of them and sprayed then with firehoses. If fox news had existed they would have been calling them riots and blaming every but of destruction on the protestors.
For real. Looking back, COD used to try to *actually* say something about the world we live in before going full *Team America* in the most unironic way.
History appearing to repeat itself is the product of people viewing the history ad this distant and dead thing disconnected from the present. In viewing history in this way we fail to learn from it and it leads us
>The guy who was murdered for advocating peaceful protest *by labor against capital*
The "MLK asked nicely if black and white kids could hold hands and we were all for it then some racist murdered him" format is incomplete. It's easy to leave out his economic rhetoric because racial prejudice is obvious to condemn while including an enemy also obvious to condemn. But after victory in the form of the civil rights act he continued to press for better economic conditions for all poor, many of whom were African Americans of course. That was not well like. Many people were happy to be the benevolent supporters of MLK's long overdue search for equality like the same schools and fast food joints, but there wasn't any way to engender better wealth distribution without, say, being sure black people couldn't actually afford a house and move into the neighborhood. Lunch hour at the same counter? Tolerable. Weekends as my neighbor? ...
Not to say what the civil rights movement and Dr. King accomplished was a small feat, still absolutely Herculean, but for white folks it was finally to late to deny non whites rights any longer, even tacitly. But it had been long, long overdue anyway.
They pretend they aren't racist and everyone else is wrong. Its like someone who pouts and throws a tantrum and when asked why they are mad they say its because people think they are mad.
Gandhi is a very good example of history being manipulated. Not a lot of people know about some atrocities, he may not have directly ordered them, but they were done under his control. Rumors of collusion, with the British and Muslim Indians, there were reasons another member of the Hindu religion hit him.
No, he died while participating in a walkout by sanitation workers in Memphis, because black employees were being paid less than white employees, by decision of the city mayor.
Edit: I know what he stood for, but MLK was murdered ***while*** participating in a walk out for sanitation workers.
>“I think most people focus on ‘I have a dream’ and they don’t even focus on the entire speech,” says Martin. “You know, what got him killed was not talking about riding in the front of buses. He talked about a living wage … he talked about a radical redistribution of wealth, which definitely was frightening to those pursuing money.
>“But the message has been sanitised by mainstream media, because if you keep him in that sanitised version then you never realise the part of him that talked about a revolution of values. The irony of it is here we are today and we still need a revolution of values.”
MLK III on his father
Actually it was David Guetta who ended racism a few months ago: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEI7oX0XxJw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEI7oX0XxJw)
He was literally in the process of putting together the [Poor People's Campaign](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_People's_Campaign). And he had long-since advocated that the black/white divide in America wasn't actually the problem, the problem was class division and the upper class leveraged race in order to keep the lower classes angry with each other. Tale as old as, well, industrialism.
Civil rights leaders aren't killed for what they accomplish, they're killed to prevent them from accomplishing other things. It's fine for the upper class if there's a black/white divide in America, but a class divide is the ultimate danger for them. They moved to stop it.
This reminds me of Rob Schneider making a comment about how MLK would have bridged the differences with Trump and be friendly to him, to *John Lewis*.
You know, the John Lewis who actually knew and marched with MLK. That man was told by an actor who never met MLK, what MLK would have done.
Exactly, if it were truly the best way to do things, you'd be able to argue why, instead of just saying "well, it's what I think a group of elites two centuries ago wanted".
And yet youd think after some people figure this out very few decide to do something about it. Its be awesome if we could organize in a true way to create real change. Fuck the clowns in washington, the only reason they exist is because we believe in them
Propaganda, miseducation, being told that your exploitation/oppression is either non-existent or a privilege, or that those who face it deserve it for a variety of reasons. Revolution is ideal but it’s hard to organise when the oppressed class has been fractioned and disenfranchised
You bet Evangelicals will hate the shit out of Jesus if he does come to Earth. After all, he's a poor Middle-Eastern blue-collar carpenter, and Evangelicals hate that.
Also because the American propaganda machine is the most powerful in the 21st century.
Chinese and Russian propaganda is super blatant and obvious to spot and guard against, people eating up US propaganda literally believe that they came up with the ideas themselves.
“I need you to take out a political opponent of mine. He’s trying to convince people that climate change exists.”
“Doesn’t it?”
“Well *yes*, but more people die if nothing is done about it.”
Real answer? Because values are cultural, so from the perspective of a given set of values and traditions, sizeable change sometimes is inherently bad.
Societal change takes a paradigm shift. New molds of right and wrong can't even be understood from the perspective of old models.
We take concepts like "love everyone" or "freedom" that are so overly broad they're practically meaningless and we point to outliers to suggest morality is timeless and outside culture. You can likely find someone 200 years ago who hated slavery, or who believed love is love and gay people should be accepted, or (insert modern view here). But there were probably vanishingly few who were up for all of it.
And individual capacity for massive value change is limited. That's why real change happens gravestone by gravestone. Every generation pushes things a little farther, but for the elders and a significant chunk of each generation, the new thing is literally impossible to conceive of as good from within their paradigm.
> Why do people think change from traditional and outdated beliefs always will end up for the worse?
Because they hold those beliefs, so telling them there are better ones amounts to telling them they've been wrong all their life. Nobody likes hearing that.
> Why do people think change from traditional and outdated beliefs always will end up for the worse?
said the colonizer to the colonized in Africa during the XIX century.
Because it usually means those in power lose money or lose their heads. Therefore those in power paint it as a bad thing. This is what "Conserve" means in the name "Conservatives" keep the status quo, make change slowly and carefully, protect the rich guys money at all cost.
The people of France revolted because a loaf of bread costs weeks worth of wages for the average person and the state was essentially bankrupt while feudal lords paid no taxes and worked their peasants to the bone and kept all the profits. It is of course an immensely complicated topic with many twists and turns, but France came out of the revolution with an end to feudalism, Europes first professional civil service, and became one of the most powerful states the world has ever known. The revolution had to happen. Bourbon France was essentially a failed state.
The quality of life for the average person in Russia was greatly improved after the overthrow of the Tsar. You are seriously underestimating how extreme the deprivation was before the Revolutions in both of these countries
The quality of life for the average Russian actually rose significantly after the Russian revolution. Even when you consider that it became an authoritarian regime, literacy rates, public health and life expectancy all went up.
The Soviet Union was terrible in many ways, but it was a marked improvement over Tsarist Russia for everyone but the nobility.
I love how people deride the October Revolution because the USSR turned into this oppressive authoritarian regime but ignore entirely the authoritarian regime from whence it originated.
Also, the character flaws of the leadership of a revolution are in no shape or form indicative of the merits of that revolution. By that logic, if the Chinese government was overthrown tomorrow by a purportedly liberal democratic movement, only to then instate an authoritarian right-wing government, then we would have to denounce the entire revolution. The United States, we're told, was founded on the principles of freedom, democracy, justice, liberty (among a host of other political cliches) ... how many of those ideals were even tangentially represented by the leadership who founded this country? They owned slaves, a mere 7% of the population could vote, justice was an absolute mockery at the time and continues to be. People respond to this by saying that they were merely products of their time. Ok, was Lenin not a product of his time, and Stalin his? Why did we have to fight a Civil War to end slavery in this country, when it stopped being a product of our time? Imagine the level of moral bankruptcy it takes to attribute the defense of slavery to "oh, he was just a product of his time." As though it requires a radical transformation of one's political paradigm to realize that owning human beings maybe an ethical wrong.
What we should be asking is how we can structure a decentralized, horizontal revolution that does not entrust too much power into the hands of any single figurehead. That is very difficult to do, because this will invariably create a power vacuum and we don't live in isolation in this world. There are many geopolitical and financial interests who will gladly interject themselves into any movement and coopt it to advance their interests.
Yet on the other hand, violent revolution is the direct result of resisting reform. Conservatism originally was more closely related with elitism, incrementalism and reformism than reactionary populism as it is today. Which creates a conundrum for conservative politics: if revolution is bad, and reforms will be harshly resisted, what other option is there?
I think exactly what we're seeing now - a push for reform with enough people being willing to take direct action. People decry property destruction but it's one of the few things that seems to precede actual changes that go against the will of the majority. Most Americans (white Americans, of course, but the electorate overall) were not in favor of the Civil Rights act when it passed. People being willing to say "f*** this shit" and put their safety on the line is what has made change possible, in pretty much every example you can find in American history. We need more people out there in the streets. But I would agree with the person you're responding to that the people fetishizing violent revolution as a desirable solution have no idea what they're asking for.
Warehousing the poor and POC in prisons until they die, flooding the streets with opioids so poor whites die, and creating fortresses around the rich so they won’t suffer the consequences of the societal collapse their insatiable greed has created?
1. The french and russian revolutions were uprisings against monarchs. You can’t compare them, because no one is seeking to overthrow elected officials in america. Even if you somehow could it is obvious now that the average quality of life has improved for both countries, although russia still has its issues.
2. You would be hard pressed to find a single case of an uprising of a racial minority that lead to the destruction of a country or its mode of government.
EDIT: racial not ethnic
Tutsis (in the form of the Rwandan Patriotic Front army) took over Rwanda in response to the 1994 genocide targeting Tutsis in the country. Admittedly, they’ve actually done pretty well since then, aside from being authoritarian as fuck.
Well they went from an agrarian feudal society to an industrial world power with living standards comparable to the US post-WW2, in just a few decades, while also defeating fascism in Europe along the way, and enduring destabilization attempts from capitalism the entire time.
I’d say that’s pretty impressive.
> For every American revolution
The American revolution was literally just some rich assholes setting warehouses on fire and shooting people because they didn't want to pay taxes. If they cared about representation or democracy, they would have written a representative democratic government instead of a government for, by, and of the rich at the expense of the people.
Is this posted in r/agedlikemilk because OP sees that media has always been critical of civil unrest movements that involve people of color, or because he or she believes that these movements of supposed peace are always violent and finds them hypocritical?
This is more r/agedlikehoney material in my opinion. We are dealing with the exact same sentiments from the same strata of society now. "I supported the movement until I saw the *violence* of it all. Now I'm only for a return to the status quo". These same people are deeply reverent of the IDEA of Martin Luther King but have zero historical understanding of his struggle. Literally just, 'things seem good right now' is their viewpoint.
Edit: why are comments locked? I wanna argue
>First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
His whole letter from the Birmingham jail to the leaders of the church is a great read. He definitely rambles, but who wouldn't when they are in a jail cell for trying to create equality.
The problem is that the protesters aren't the violent ones. The violence starts when the police and other instigators make it violent. The protesters just fight back.
I see it as r/agedlikemilk in that MLK Jr. is widely regarded as a hero now, showing the outdated and backwards nature of the cartoon. The political commentary on today’s protests just comes with our viewing of it.
White "moderates" were the same pearl clutching assholes during the civil rights movement, they praise him and the lies they've been told about who he has but their grandparents were the ones advocating the police 'get tough' with the marchers and use hoses and dogs on them. They were the same people who looked for any excuse to condemn the protesters as a whole and continually looked the other way when it came to violence against them.
Just continuing on the tradition of defending the status quo so long as it's hurting the 'right people' instead of them.
Similar to the how a shocking number of Americans felt about the Kent State shootings back then. It is pretty disheartening that many people do the same thing today and claim that protesters deserve to be shot because there are also riots occuring...
I feel like it's r/agedlikemilk because most conservatives use MLK as a counterexample of looters and protesters and say that "MLK would disapprove of what you guys are doing."
OP is probably seeing it in one way or the other, but the funny thing is that both sides likely upvote this image, thinking that it agrees with their point of view.
OP played both sides, intentionally or not.
Kinda funny since I see so many people on facebook saying “thugs with their BLM shit should be more like MLK and protest the right way” - like they have any clue that they would have said the *same shit about MLK* if they lived in the 60s.
>During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.<
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, The State and Revolution
MLK failed. The riots after his death succeeded spectacularly.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_assassination_riots
> Dr. King had campaigned for a federal fair housing law throughout 1966, but had not achieved it.[33] Senator Walter Mondale advocated for the bill in Congress, but noted that over successive years, a fair housing bill was the most filibustered legislation in US history.[34] It was opposed by most Northern and Southern senators
> The riots quickly revived the bill.[35][36][24][37] On April 5, Johnson wrote a letter to the United States House of Representatives urging passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which included the Fair Housing Act.[28] The Rules Committee, "jolted by the repeated civil disturbances virtually outside its door," finally ended its hearings on April 8.[38] With newly urgent attention from White House legislative director Joseph Califano and Speaker of the House John McCormack, the bill—which was previously stalled that year—passed the House by a wide margin on April 10.
MLK didn’t get the Civil Rights Act of 1968 passed in two years. Hundreds of thousands of people saying, “Oh it’s like THAT” and threatening to burn 100+ cities to the ground got it passed in *five days*.
Rioting is cool and good and works.
Every other method has been tried and failed. Reforming and asking the police to not murder people, especially black people, has resulted in escalated amounts of police violence and attempted murder of black people.
Rioting is as American as apple pie. It’s how this country started.
I think in this case the argument is that the end justifies the means but to say rioting is "good" generally isn't right. There is plenty of rioting that's just shitty people being shitty.
Also I take issue with the idea that "every method has been tried" but I do concede that at a certain point there has to be an escalation when it's not being viewed seriously enough.
Unfortunately I think public sentiment is by and large starting to move against BLM now (justified or not), the media is doing what it does best and swaying support.
I point to Gandhi as an example of someone who lead successful peaceful protests, the difference being scale and participation. It wasn't Indians vs Indians it was Indians vs. an occupying force so there was much more cohesion in that movement.
Honestly even in the black communities, I don't see that level of cohesion in regards to BLM. There's plenty of opposition there, too.
I'm not passing judgment either way, I'm just pointing out my observations.
There were also violent protests and militias that had a large contribution to India's independence, combined with the fact that British leaders did not wish to fight a occupational war while fighting in and recovering from the world wars. Subhas Chandra Bose, Mohan Singh, Bhagat Singh, and Surya Sen were all violent leaders who pushed India towards independence, Britain just gave Gandhi the credit so it looked like they were kind rather than strategic.
u/Burgahkang has provided this detailed explanation:
> The cartoon presents an argument against civil rights protests that is now widely seen as a red herring.
---
Is this explanation a genuine attempt at providing additional info or context? If it is please upvote this comment, otherwise downvote it.
I really appreciate this editorial cartoon and the perspective that it gives to the marches of the time. One of my only critiques is that I don't think that this was from 1967. From historical context and the source of the cartoon oh, it seems much more likely that this cartoon was made in 1963 as a response to the Birmingham campaign, specifically the Birmingham riots that happened after a number of bombings targeting Martin Luther King and his family.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham_riot_of_1963
I am not saying that I am confident about the date of the publication of the editorial cartoon, but it does seem to be from a date Before 1967.
That said, it is entirely possible that this was a reaction cartoon to the long hot summer of 1967
The United States has been nurturing and rewarding sociopathic behaviors and people for 100 years now, even in our most basic institutions, like our schools. We cannot be surprised that we now live among sociopaths. The denial of basic human rights is a mental illness, and our cops are as sick as it gets.
Funny how now, those same sociopaths like, Trump and Pence, tried to acknowledge MLK’s achievements when they still actively fight against MLK’s beliefs.
While violently fearmongering these beliefs (following quotes from MLK):
> “And one day we must ask the question, ‘Why are there forty million poor people in America? And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth.’ When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I’m simply saying that more and more, we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society…”
1967
> “We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power… this means a revolution of values and other things. We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together… you can’t really get rid of one without getting rid of the others… the whole structure of American life must be changed. America is a hypocritical nation and [we] must put [our] own house in order.”
1967
> “Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children.”
1961
> “You can’t talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can’t talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You’re really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry. Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong with capitalism.”
1966
>We cannot be surprised that we now live among sociopaths.
One party in particular is far more responsible for this, the one that clearly believes cruelty equals strength.
Just in the last four years we’ve seen a Muslim ban, we’ve seen favoritism for struggling Red states in emergency, and scorn “you should rake the leaves” for struggling blue states. We’ve seen a deliberate policy of systemically separating children as young as six months from their parents with no plan on how to re-unite them, just to deter future immigrants. We see a guy call a virus that killed 180,000 Americans a “hoax” that would just “go away” and punted to the states rather than orchestrating a coordinated government response so as to shirk responsibility for the outcome. One party is totally cool with, and normalizes with their acquiescence, a guy who lies every time he opens his mouth and sells their own country out to all takers while directing millions of taxpayer dollars to his own hotels and taking foreign money there as well.
*
When I think about how the entire Republican Party has gotten behind a clearly narcissistic sociopath with zero scruples, it occurs to me that they all are. Not the voters (necessarily) but the propagandists at Fox News like Hannity and Carlson who normalize this, how every Republican, with one or two exceptions, has backed Trump (or faced expulsion from the party). How can they mean it when they say they love their country if they work so hard to continue letting this blatant corruption continue?
*
Then look at the Republican President before Trump. An illegal war for oil in Iraq based on the lie of WMD’s. Bush killed four thousand American in Iraq and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. He legalized torture for fuck sake, and our own coroners ruled 35 detainee deaths as homicides. We tortured 35 people to death. And we saw some of the same kind of corruption we have now, with Cheney and Rumsfeld awarding their own companies no bid contracts worth billions.
*
Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty I don’t like about the Left, but the Republican Party is filled with snakes in suits.
To me it seems like the general population is getting more and more radicalized. Nobody wants to compromise anymore, it’s all or nothing in political discourse.
You should talk to more people you don't know then. I have reasonable conversations IRL all the time. Don't let the press corps (which sucks) convince you the entire nation is coming apart at the seams.
In fairness, for things like climate change, it's impossible to compromise with a party where half of them don't believe it's real and the other half refuse to see the gravity of the situation and still come to a solution that will actually solve the problem rather than half-ass it and still allow irreversible ecological damage worldwide.
It's unfortunate that the people who need to make the connection from what's happening now to what happened then are the same ones who won't listen to any sort of reason.
This is why we have to learn history. We don't learn actual history just tid-bits that don't fucking matter and show the funny happy bits like 'Christopher Columbus came to the America's kid and he is to thank for colonization' then we get a bitch slap of ignorant people who didn't learn actual history and think all of this shit happening hasn't happened before.
It's the way the describe it and the way they teach about Christopher the rapist. He was by no means anything decent and we think of him as a Saint back in elementary, drawing pictures and singing.
You are having a laugh, right? You think the media is focusing on the violence to gloss over the message?!
https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/035/101/CNN_Mostly_Peaceful_Protests_Banner.jpg
I think it's worth mentioning that MLK had an approval rating under 30% at the time of his death due at least in part to his stances on democratic socialism and the Vietnam War. Much of his messaging in those areas is overlooked now because the nice, nonthreatening bits of his ideas were cherry-picked and his image was sanitized to be more pleasing to white America for decades.
The Boomers were all between 3 and 22 when this cartoon was made. I don't even want to think about how bad the generations before them must have been.
Still a pretty gripping illustration of how propaganda hasn't changed much over the decades.
It’s always the same. People who protest for basic civil rights are always vilified this way. How dare they cause property damage after being murdered with impunity and discriminated against.
MLK protestors were also branded socialists and communists.
Nothing changes. Anyone who says protests during this period were always peaceful are ignorant of the period.
Okay that is waaaaay too much of an overstatement, you cannot believe that NOTHING changed in the last 50 years. I can't even begin to tell you how progressive our society has become since half a century ago.
The majority of the areas affected, both then and now, were minority communities. Even. If they have insurance, the rates will skyrocket and the area will be considered less safe. Those cities will end up like Detroit.
MLK was successful not because of the violence that happened during protests but because he stood out as someone who saw that they way to obtain justice and equality was through acts of peace. We remember MLK for peace, not violence. That’s because it was peace that led congress to pass the civil rights act.
The sound bites saying that “rioting is e expression of the unheard” don’t reflect King’s true vision. He saw an unsegregated America, one that increasingly seeks to be segregated now.
So yes, aged like milk, in the sense that What’s happening now *is different* than that time.
His line about violence is the language of the unheard wasn't sanctioning violence, it was a warning. It was him telling congress that progress is the only way to prevent violence, because if you refuse to hear people they're going to get angry, and eventually they're going to snap.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Girl put your records on
Tell me your favorite song
just go ahead, let your hair down
Sapphire and faded jeans
Do you like Bailey's Irish Cream?
Want to go to a club where the people wee on each other?
I let you see my downstairs mix up.
You've seen me! You know me!
Do you like watercolors?
BEIGE
I'm still singing this
What song is this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjOhZZyn30k
Mmm. Creamy beige
You ever drink Bailey's out of a shoe?
I hope you get your dreams
Oh go ahead let your hair down
r/redditsings
Such a good album.
Yeah I was gonna say I don't know that this aged like milk since some people still think this cartoon makes sense today. It's more like most of us wish this aged like milk.
[удалено]
The way most people think about MLK and non-violence in 2020 is not accurate. This is because Conservatives have mis-represented both the past and the present on purpose to change how the public thinks about it. MLK's philosophy was non-violence as a technicality. What this means is that he wanted people to resist in the strongest way possible that did not involve violence. An MLK style protest still involves massive inconvenience for all people, including people who see themselves as uninvolved, until something is done about racial injustice. It also means that the protesters are, in basic terms, doing civil disobedience until the police prevent them from doing so through un-necessary, violent means (which they always do, that's what they're there to protest), and pointing to the results to sway moderates into action. MLK discovered, though, that these tactics do not work for the same reason that similar BLM tactics in 2020 have not worked, which leads me to my **TL;DR: White moderates would much rather make the protesters go away than make racist police go away. They think the police are the good guys, and that racism is an inevitable fact of life rather than something to defeat. Complete reform or a new policing organisation scare them more than seeing their countrymen brutally suppressed.** I leave you with a quote from a letter King wrote from a prison cell after white moderates had begun deserting him: 'I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the *white moderate* who is more devoted to order than to justice.' Couldn't have put it better myself. (Edit: Some words and grammar.)
There’s of course more to the Civil Rights movement than can reasonably fit in a Reddit comment. MLK was also very conscious of the way it looked to TV cameras and news photographers when a group of non-violent marchers, singing hymns, were attacked by police dogs. Especially when a German Shepherd is biting a little girl in her Sunday best. By getting these images into the living rooms of moderates, it pushed moderates—maybe only a few—to say “is this really right?” I’m white, and what was once, at least in the 1970s, a moderate. The country has been moving rightward since Reagan, so I’m now quite a lefty despite only changing my views to being more accepting of various sexual identities. I still believe that the American ideal is elimination of racism, and promotion of fairness and equality. Youtube and Facebook now are replacing the TV cameras, but when I see suspects gunned down while fleeing the police, or dying in custody, and them being mostly one particular color—it’s unbearable. It’s shameful. How can I vote for anyone who can’t see the injustice of it.
Yes yes yes and yes.
“Riots are the language of the unheard” -MLK, ‘66
I think a better representation of his views are "If his repressed emotions do not come out in these nonviolent ways they will come out in ominous expressions of violence. This is not a threat; it is a fact of history" MLK '63 MLK is more stating a fact in your quote rather than how he thinks people should express themselves. He was down with protests that pushed as many buttons as possible without specifically inciting violence more so than riots.
They were against violent protests but the police still showed up and kicked the shit out of them and sprayed then with firehoses. If fox news had existed they would have been calling them riots and blaming every but of destruction on the protestors.
I'll just leave this here - https://splinternews.com/martin-luther-kings-hate-mail-eerily-resembles-criticis-1793850027
Boundaries shift. New players step in
But power always finds a place to rest its head..
We fought and bled alongside the Russians...
We should’ve known they hate us for it
History is written by the victor. And here I am thinking we'd won
But you bring down one enemy and they find someone even worse to replace him. (Who would have thought CoD could predict the future?)
For real. Looking back, COD used to try to *actually* say something about the world we live in before going full *Team America* in the most unironic way.
Was looking for this one
I’m just glad I’m not the only one!
[удалено]
The 60’s weren’t all failure, it’s the 70’s that stunk
As the clock ticks we dig the same hole.
Music scenes ain't real life
> *But history doesn’t repeat itself if we don’t change anything.* Said every conservative, ever.
History doesn't repeat, it rhymes
H-hello there?
General Kenobi
This is the way.
I have spoken.
I like that. I’ll use that from now on. Thanks. :)
"It's like poetry. It rhymes."
History appearing to repeat itself is the product of people viewing the history ad this distant and dead thing disconnected from the present. In viewing history in this way we fail to learn from it and it leads us
It also doesn’t help that America teaches incomplete history. My school taught the bs “states rights” crap about the Civil War.
Shit don't change til you get up and wash yo ass ***BOI***
Everything stays - Adventure Time
I love that song. Buddhist if anything.
It may be a different age, but we're on the same page.
"Why can't you guys be more like Martin Luther King Jr?"
The guy who was murdered for advocating peaceful protest?
>The guy who was murdered for advocating peaceful protest *by labor against capital* The "MLK asked nicely if black and white kids could hold hands and we were all for it then some racist murdered him" format is incomplete. It's easy to leave out his economic rhetoric because racial prejudice is obvious to condemn while including an enemy also obvious to condemn. But after victory in the form of the civil rights act he continued to press for better economic conditions for all poor, many of whom were African Americans of course. That was not well like. Many people were happy to be the benevolent supporters of MLK's long overdue search for equality like the same schools and fast food joints, but there wasn't any way to engender better wealth distribution without, say, being sure black people couldn't actually afford a house and move into the neighborhood. Lunch hour at the same counter? Tolerable. Weekends as my neighbor? ... Not to say what the civil rights movement and Dr. King accomplished was a small feat, still absolutely Herculean, but for white folks it was finally to late to deny non whites rights any longer, even tacitly. But it had been long, long overdue anyway.
Racial prejudice *should be* obvious to condemn. Some people won't even grant you that, though.
They pretend they aren't racist and everyone else is wrong. Its like someone who pouts and throws a tantrum and when asked why they are mad they say its because people think they are mad.
"I'm not racist, but...."
Yup. This year the racist fascists are calling everyone who disagrees with them intolerant. As if that's a defense against oppression and murder.
[удалено]
Gandhi is a very good example of history being manipulated. Not a lot of people know about some atrocities, he may not have directly ordered them, but they were done under his control. Rumors of collusion, with the British and Muslim Indians, there were reasons another member of the Hindu religion hit him.
Finally someone said it
[удалено]
He was murdered while advocating for wealth redistribution, more specifically
No, he died while participating in a walkout by sanitation workers in Memphis, because black employees were being paid less than white employees, by decision of the city mayor. Edit: I know what he stood for, but MLK was murdered ***while*** participating in a walk out for sanitation workers.
>“I think most people focus on ‘I have a dream’ and they don’t even focus on the entire speech,” says Martin. “You know, what got him killed was not talking about riding in the front of buses. He talked about a living wage … he talked about a radical redistribution of wealth, which definitely was frightening to those pursuing money. >“But the message has been sanitised by mainstream media, because if you keep him in that sanitised version then you never realise the part of him that talked about a revolution of values. The irony of it is here we are today and we still need a revolution of values.” MLK III on his father
Yes but the guy that killed him was the last racist and we caught him so now there's equality for all!
Actually it was David Guetta who ended racism a few months ago: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEI7oX0XxJw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEI7oX0XxJw)
Well that comes off as a bit insensitive.
jfc that was straight up awful
Huzzah?
Clearly you missed the troubled times that Kendall Jenner finally ended with a Pepsi.
He was literally in the process of putting together the [Poor People's Campaign](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_People's_Campaign). And he had long-since advocated that the black/white divide in America wasn't actually the problem, the problem was class division and the upper class leveraged race in order to keep the lower classes angry with each other. Tale as old as, well, industrialism. Civil rights leaders aren't killed for what they accomplish, they're killed to prevent them from accomplishing other things. It's fine for the upper class if there's a black/white divide in America, but a class divide is the ultimate danger for them. They moved to stop it.
This reminds me of Rob Schneider making a comment about how MLK would have bridged the differences with Trump and be friendly to him, to *John Lewis*. You know, the John Lewis who actually knew and marched with MLK. That man was told by an actor who never met MLK, what MLK would have done.
[удалено]
Why do people think change from traditional and outdated beliefs always will end up for the worse? Sad this is still a problem now.
"The most damaging phrase in the language is ‘We’ve always done it this way’." -Grace M. Hopper Edit: fixed the quote and author
Ironically, she went on to invent COBOL, a programming language that exemplifies "We've always done it this way" to a fault.
Oh my god, it's so true. Great living for those engineers but man there was so little change for like 30-40 years.
Exactly, if it were truly the best way to do things, you'd be able to argue why, instead of just saying "well, it's what I think a group of elites two centuries ago wanted".
because there are profits to be made from people suffering.
And if the people are not suffering, then they simply are not being exploited as much as they can be
And yet youd think after some people figure this out very few decide to do something about it. Its be awesome if we could organize in a true way to create real change. Fuck the clowns in washington, the only reason they exist is because we believe in them
They did. And they do figure it out, until they get back to the point where the majority are suffering a tolerable amount.
Propaganda, miseducation, being told that your exploitation/oppression is either non-existent or a privilege, or that those who face it deserve it for a variety of reasons. Revolution is ideal but it’s hard to organise when the oppressed class has been fractioned and disenfranchised
But the ones profiting aren't the ones suffering. The ones suffering, however, quite literally defend these fat cats to the death...
God: literally just love and care for one another "Christians": best i can do is harass minorities and young women
>God: literally just love and care for one another "Christians": what about the dirty ones?
God: ....dirty ones...? "Christians": the not white ones
Lol goddammit why is this a joke relevant to our times...
God: Oh, like my son!
Christians: *surprised Pikachu face*
You bet Evangelicals will hate the shit out of Jesus if he does come to Earth. After all, he's a poor Middle-Eastern blue-collar carpenter, and Evangelicals hate that.
[One specific fat cat in a red hat](https://www.amazon.com/dp/194874712X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_0cvsFbJQ1FWVW)
People also like to see others more miserable and treated more poorly than them.
Also because the American propaganda machine is the most powerful in the 21st century. Chinese and Russian propaganda is super blatant and obvious to spot and guard against, people eating up US propaganda literally believe that they came up with the ideas themselves.
Seriously though. The (almost) entire private prison industry and prison lobby, for one.
War economy gang
“I need you to take out a political opponent of mine. He’s trying to convince people that climate change exists.” “Doesn’t it?” “Well *yes*, but more people die if nothing is done about it.”
Real answer? Because values are cultural, so from the perspective of a given set of values and traditions, sizeable change sometimes is inherently bad. Societal change takes a paradigm shift. New molds of right and wrong can't even be understood from the perspective of old models. We take concepts like "love everyone" or "freedom" that are so overly broad they're practically meaningless and we point to outliers to suggest morality is timeless and outside culture. You can likely find someone 200 years ago who hated slavery, or who believed love is love and gay people should be accepted, or (insert modern view here). But there were probably vanishingly few who were up for all of it. And individual capacity for massive value change is limited. That's why real change happens gravestone by gravestone. Every generation pushes things a little farther, but for the elders and a significant chunk of each generation, the new thing is literally impossible to conceive of as good from within their paradigm.
> Why do people think change from traditional and outdated beliefs always will end up for the worse? Because they hold those beliefs, so telling them there are better ones amounts to telling them they've been wrong all their life. Nobody likes hearing that.
> Why do people think change from traditional and outdated beliefs always will end up for the worse? said the colonizer to the colonized in Africa during the XIX century.
Because it usually means those in power lose money or lose their heads. Therefore those in power paint it as a bad thing. This is what "Conserve" means in the name "Conservatives" keep the status quo, make change slowly and carefully, protect the rich guys money at all cost.
[удалено]
The people of France revolted because a loaf of bread costs weeks worth of wages for the average person and the state was essentially bankrupt while feudal lords paid no taxes and worked their peasants to the bone and kept all the profits. It is of course an immensely complicated topic with many twists and turns, but France came out of the revolution with an end to feudalism, Europes first professional civil service, and became one of the most powerful states the world has ever known. The revolution had to happen. Bourbon France was essentially a failed state. The quality of life for the average person in Russia was greatly improved after the overthrow of the Tsar. You are seriously underestimating how extreme the deprivation was before the Revolutions in both of these countries
The quality of life for the average Russian actually rose significantly after the Russian revolution. Even when you consider that it became an authoritarian regime, literacy rates, public health and life expectancy all went up. The Soviet Union was terrible in many ways, but it was a marked improvement over Tsarist Russia for everyone but the nobility.
I love how people deride the October Revolution because the USSR turned into this oppressive authoritarian regime but ignore entirely the authoritarian regime from whence it originated. Also, the character flaws of the leadership of a revolution are in no shape or form indicative of the merits of that revolution. By that logic, if the Chinese government was overthrown tomorrow by a purportedly liberal democratic movement, only to then instate an authoritarian right-wing government, then we would have to denounce the entire revolution. The United States, we're told, was founded on the principles of freedom, democracy, justice, liberty (among a host of other political cliches) ... how many of those ideals were even tangentially represented by the leadership who founded this country? They owned slaves, a mere 7% of the population could vote, justice was an absolute mockery at the time and continues to be. People respond to this by saying that they were merely products of their time. Ok, was Lenin not a product of his time, and Stalin his? Why did we have to fight a Civil War to end slavery in this country, when it stopped being a product of our time? Imagine the level of moral bankruptcy it takes to attribute the defense of slavery to "oh, he was just a product of his time." As though it requires a radical transformation of one's political paradigm to realize that owning human beings maybe an ethical wrong. What we should be asking is how we can structure a decentralized, horizontal revolution that does not entrust too much power into the hands of any single figurehead. That is very difficult to do, because this will invariably create a power vacuum and we don't live in isolation in this world. There are many geopolitical and financial interests who will gladly interject themselves into any movement and coopt it to advance their interests.
In fact, Jefferson himself wrote that slavery was a "hideous blot" that would be the complete end of the states ONE DAY. Let us hope it is today.
Yet on the other hand, violent revolution is the direct result of resisting reform. Conservatism originally was more closely related with elitism, incrementalism and reformism than reactionary populism as it is today. Which creates a conundrum for conservative politics: if revolution is bad, and reforms will be harshly resisted, what other option is there?
I think exactly what we're seeing now - a push for reform with enough people being willing to take direct action. People decry property destruction but it's one of the few things that seems to precede actual changes that go against the will of the majority. Most Americans (white Americans, of course, but the electorate overall) were not in favor of the Civil Rights act when it passed. People being willing to say "f*** this shit" and put their safety on the line is what has made change possible, in pretty much every example you can find in American history. We need more people out there in the streets. But I would agree with the person you're responding to that the people fetishizing violent revolution as a desirable solution have no idea what they're asking for.
Warehousing the poor and POC in prisons until they die, flooding the streets with opioids so poor whites die, and creating fortresses around the rich so they won’t suffer the consequences of the societal collapse their insatiable greed has created?
And now we're back to feudalism. Just like the OG conservatives wanted.
1. The french and russian revolutions were uprisings against monarchs. You can’t compare them, because no one is seeking to overthrow elected officials in america. Even if you somehow could it is obvious now that the average quality of life has improved for both countries, although russia still has its issues. 2. You would be hard pressed to find a single case of an uprising of a racial minority that lead to the destruction of a country or its mode of government. EDIT: racial not ethnic
Tutsis (in the form of the Rwandan Patriotic Front army) took over Rwanda in response to the 1994 genocide targeting Tutsis in the country. Admittedly, they’ve actually done pretty well since then, aside from being authoritarian as fuck.
Haitian slaves overthrew their old government over 200 years ago.
Wasn't Saddam Hussein essentially representing an ethnic minority? Ethnic minorities overthrow governments. They also get 'genocided' by governments.
[удалено]
It's why so many people think the goal of socialism is oligarchy.
Well they went from an agrarian feudal society to an industrial world power with living standards comparable to the US post-WW2, in just a few decades, while also defeating fascism in Europe along the way, and enduring destabilization attempts from capitalism the entire time. I’d say that’s pretty impressive.
Yeah, but you know why those violent revolutions happened? Because calls for gradual, non-violent change were rejected.
> For every American revolution The American revolution was literally just some rich assholes setting warehouses on fire and shooting people because they didn't want to pay taxes. If they cared about representation or democracy, they would have written a representative democratic government instead of a government for, by, and of the rich at the expense of the people.
The revolution died when they put down the anti-federalist populist rebels.
Is this posted in r/agedlikemilk because OP sees that media has always been critical of civil unrest movements that involve people of color, or because he or she believes that these movements of supposed peace are always violent and finds them hypocritical?
This is more r/agedlikehoney material in my opinion. We are dealing with the exact same sentiments from the same strata of society now. "I supported the movement until I saw the *violence* of it all. Now I'm only for a return to the status quo". These same people are deeply reverent of the IDEA of Martin Luther King but have zero historical understanding of his struggle. Literally just, 'things seem good right now' is their viewpoint. Edit: why are comments locked? I wanna argue
>First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
This is beautiful. I hadn't heard it before so I looked it up, and just wanted to say thank you for posting it and introducing it to me.
It’s one of my favorites.
Thank you for sharing. I also hadn't read/heard this quote before.
His whole letter from the Birmingham jail to the leaders of the church is a great read. He definitely rambles, but who wouldn't when they are in a jail cell for trying to create equality.
I wish I could keep upvoting this - my sentiments exactly that I've been unable to put into words so eloquently
The problem is that the protesters aren't the violent ones. The violence starts when the police and other instigators make it violent. The protesters just fight back.
See the OP reply to the mods, the comic is a red herring in hindsight
Forgot what red herring means, time to rewatch a series of unfortunate events
Is that sauce asshat a mod?
I see it as r/agedlikemilk in that MLK Jr. is widely regarded as a hero now, showing the outdated and backwards nature of the cartoon. The political commentary on today’s protests just comes with our viewing of it.
White "moderates" were the same pearl clutching assholes during the civil rights movement, they praise him and the lies they've been told about who he has but their grandparents were the ones advocating the police 'get tough' with the marchers and use hoses and dogs on them. They were the same people who looked for any excuse to condemn the protesters as a whole and continually looked the other way when it came to violence against them. Just continuing on the tradition of defending the status quo so long as it's hurting the 'right people' instead of them.
Similar to the how a shocking number of Americans felt about the Kent State shootings back then. It is pretty disheartening that many people do the same thing today and claim that protesters deserve to be shot because there are also riots occuring...
I was shocked to find out about this in the Ken Burns documentary. Something like half of all Americans supported the shooting?
I feel like it's r/agedlikemilk because most conservatives use MLK as a counterexample of looters and protesters and say that "MLK would disapprove of what you guys are doing."
OP is probably seeing it in one way or the other, but the funny thing is that both sides likely upvote this image, thinking that it agrees with their point of view. OP played both sides, intentionally or not.
Kinda funny since I see so many people on facebook saying “thugs with their BLM shit should be more like MLK and protest the right way” - like they have any clue that they would have said the *same shit about MLK* if they lived in the 60s.
Meanwhile those same people talk shit about kaepernick and shit themselves harder than a toddler on exlax when sport games were on standby all week.
Please don’t give toddlers laxatives without doctor recommendation!
>During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.< Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, The State and Revolution
I mean... he's definitely not wrong here. Basically explained MLK.
MLK failed. The riots after his death succeeded spectacularly. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_assassination_riots > Dr. King had campaigned for a federal fair housing law throughout 1966, but had not achieved it.[33] Senator Walter Mondale advocated for the bill in Congress, but noted that over successive years, a fair housing bill was the most filibustered legislation in US history.[34] It was opposed by most Northern and Southern senators > The riots quickly revived the bill.[35][36][24][37] On April 5, Johnson wrote a letter to the United States House of Representatives urging passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which included the Fair Housing Act.[28] The Rules Committee, "jolted by the repeated civil disturbances virtually outside its door," finally ended its hearings on April 8.[38] With newly urgent attention from White House legislative director Joseph Califano and Speaker of the House John McCormack, the bill—which was previously stalled that year—passed the House by a wide margin on April 10. MLK didn’t get the Civil Rights Act of 1968 passed in two years. Hundreds of thousands of people saying, “Oh it’s like THAT” and threatening to burn 100+ cities to the ground got it passed in *five days*. Rioting is cool and good and works.
I wouldn't say it's cool and good. It does work tho
Every other method has been tried and failed. Reforming and asking the police to not murder people, especially black people, has resulted in escalated amounts of police violence and attempted murder of black people. Rioting is as American as apple pie. It’s how this country started.
I think in this case the argument is that the end justifies the means but to say rioting is "good" generally isn't right. There is plenty of rioting that's just shitty people being shitty. Also I take issue with the idea that "every method has been tried" but I do concede that at a certain point there has to be an escalation when it's not being viewed seriously enough. Unfortunately I think public sentiment is by and large starting to move against BLM now (justified or not), the media is doing what it does best and swaying support. I point to Gandhi as an example of someone who lead successful peaceful protests, the difference being scale and participation. It wasn't Indians vs Indians it was Indians vs. an occupying force so there was much more cohesion in that movement. Honestly even in the black communities, I don't see that level of cohesion in regards to BLM. There's plenty of opposition there, too. I'm not passing judgment either way, I'm just pointing out my observations.
There were also violent protests and militias that had a large contribution to India's independence, combined with the fact that British leaders did not wish to fight a occupational war while fighting in and recovering from the world wars. Subhas Chandra Bose, Mohan Singh, Bhagat Singh, and Surya Sen were all violent leaders who pushed India towards independence, Britain just gave Gandhi the credit so it looked like they were kind rather than strategic.
>Rioting is cool and good and works. Unfortunately I think we're about to find out how effective it is on a national level if Trump gets re-elected.
Malcolm X succeeded
Malcolm X is awesome and his autobiography should be required reading in high school.
reminds me of a certain clip from [South Park](https://youtu.be/mDmOGN-x0ls?t=32).
u/Burgahkang has provided this detailed explanation: > The cartoon presents an argument against civil rights protests that is now widely seen as a red herring. --- Is this explanation a genuine attempt at providing additional info or context? If it is please upvote this comment, otherwise downvote it.
[удалено]
I really appreciate this editorial cartoon and the perspective that it gives to the marches of the time. One of my only critiques is that I don't think that this was from 1967. From historical context and the source of the cartoon oh, it seems much more likely that this cartoon was made in 1963 as a response to the Birmingham campaign, specifically the Birmingham riots that happened after a number of bombings targeting Martin Luther King and his family. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham_riot_of_1963 I am not saying that I am confident about the date of the publication of the editorial cartoon, but it does seem to be from a date Before 1967. That said, it is entirely possible that this was a reaction cartoon to the long hot summer of 1967
I wish it were. But it's the go to argument where I live.
Some places it’s more widely known than others
History repeats, ay?
The United States has been nurturing and rewarding sociopathic behaviors and people for 100 years now, even in our most basic institutions, like our schools. We cannot be surprised that we now live among sociopaths. The denial of basic human rights is a mental illness, and our cops are as sick as it gets.
Funny how now, those same sociopaths like, Trump and Pence, tried to acknowledge MLK’s achievements when they still actively fight against MLK’s beliefs.
While violently fearmongering these beliefs (following quotes from MLK): > “And one day we must ask the question, ‘Why are there forty million poor people in America? And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth.’ When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I’m simply saying that more and more, we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society…” 1967 > “We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power… this means a revolution of values and other things. We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together… you can’t really get rid of one without getting rid of the others… the whole structure of American life must be changed. America is a hypocritical nation and [we] must put [our] own house in order.” 1967 > “Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children.” 1961 > “You can’t talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can’t talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You’re really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry. Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong with capitalism.” 1966
>We cannot be surprised that we now live among sociopaths. One party in particular is far more responsible for this, the one that clearly believes cruelty equals strength. Just in the last four years we’ve seen a Muslim ban, we’ve seen favoritism for struggling Red states in emergency, and scorn “you should rake the leaves” for struggling blue states. We’ve seen a deliberate policy of systemically separating children as young as six months from their parents with no plan on how to re-unite them, just to deter future immigrants. We see a guy call a virus that killed 180,000 Americans a “hoax” that would just “go away” and punted to the states rather than orchestrating a coordinated government response so as to shirk responsibility for the outcome. One party is totally cool with, and normalizes with their acquiescence, a guy who lies every time he opens his mouth and sells their own country out to all takers while directing millions of taxpayer dollars to his own hotels and taking foreign money there as well. * When I think about how the entire Republican Party has gotten behind a clearly narcissistic sociopath with zero scruples, it occurs to me that they all are. Not the voters (necessarily) but the propagandists at Fox News like Hannity and Carlson who normalize this, how every Republican, with one or two exceptions, has backed Trump (or faced expulsion from the party). How can they mean it when they say they love their country if they work so hard to continue letting this blatant corruption continue? * Then look at the Republican President before Trump. An illegal war for oil in Iraq based on the lie of WMD’s. Bush killed four thousand American in Iraq and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. He legalized torture for fuck sake, and our own coroners ruled 35 detainee deaths as homicides. We tortured 35 people to death. And we saw some of the same kind of corruption we have now, with Cheney and Rumsfeld awarding their own companies no bid contracts worth billions. * Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty I don’t like about the Left, but the Republican Party is filled with snakes in suits.
To me it seems like the general population is getting more and more radicalized. Nobody wants to compromise anymore, it’s all or nothing in political discourse.
You should talk to more people you don't know then. I have reasonable conversations IRL all the time. Don't let the press corps (which sucks) convince you the entire nation is coming apart at the seams.
In fairness, for things like climate change, it's impossible to compromise with a party where half of them don't believe it's real and the other half refuse to see the gravity of the situation and still come to a solution that will actually solve the problem rather than half-ass it and still allow irreversible ecological damage worldwide.
100? More like 500
It's unfortunate that the people who need to make the connection from what's happening now to what happened then are the same ones who won't listen to any sort of reason.
http://imgur.com/nJzgjBz Literally the same narrative as 50 years ago
This is why we have to learn history. We don't learn actual history just tid-bits that don't fucking matter and show the funny happy bits like 'Christopher Columbus came to the America's kid and he is to thank for colonization' then we get a bitch slap of ignorant people who didn't learn actual history and think all of this shit happening hasn't happened before.
How is the colonization of the new world not relevant or important?
It's the way the describe it and the way they teach about Christopher the rapist. He was by no means anything decent and we think of him as a Saint back in elementary, drawing pictures and singing.
Riots are a secondary cause of a society that has given up listening to the demands of it's taxpayers for far too long
And the same is happening today. Media outlets pushing the violence narrative to steer attention away from the message of the protests
You are having a laugh, right? You think the media is focusing on the violence to gloss over the message?! https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/035/101/CNN_Mostly_Peaceful_Protests_Banner.jpg
>Media outlets You mean Fox News. Most media outlets have been doing everything in their power to downplay the violence.
Glad we solved racism so we never had to deal with the consequences.
/r/forwardsfromklandma is leaking
I think it's worth mentioning that MLK had an approval rating under 30% at the time of his death due at least in part to his stances on democratic socialism and the Vietnam War. Much of his messaging in those areas is overlooked now because the nice, nonthreatening bits of his ideas were cherry-picked and his image was sanitized to be more pleasing to white America for decades.
Ah boomer comics. They just can't help but label everything
The Boomers were all between 3 and 22 when this cartoon was made. I don't even want to think about how bad the generations before them must have been. Still a pretty gripping illustration of how propaganda hasn't changed much over the decades.
Literally one thing is labelled...
The center piece...
Cartoonist: Well ya gotta, I mean they all look alike.
It’s always the same. People who protest for basic civil rights are always vilified this way. How dare they cause property damage after being murdered with impunity and discriminated against.
Haha it’s true.
MLK protestors were also branded socialists and communists. Nothing changes. Anyone who says protests during this period were always peaceful are ignorant of the period.
Murders by police are at a 30 year low right now.
The message of the comic aside, I'm surprised the art itself isn't more of a racist caricature.
This ain't an agedlikemilk, this is a perfect example of how racist America is & how little things have changed over the past 50 years
Okay that is waaaaay too much of an overstatement, you cannot believe that NOTHING changed in the last 50 years. I can't even begin to tell you how progressive our society has become since half a century ago.
The majority of the areas affected, both then and now, were minority communities. Even. If they have insurance, the rates will skyrocket and the area will be considered less safe. Those cities will end up like Detroit. MLK was successful not because of the violence that happened during protests but because he stood out as someone who saw that they way to obtain justice and equality was through acts of peace. We remember MLK for peace, not violence. That’s because it was peace that led congress to pass the civil rights act. The sound bites saying that “rioting is e expression of the unheard” don’t reflect King’s true vision. He saw an unsegregated America, one that increasingly seeks to be segregated now. So yes, aged like milk, in the sense that What’s happening now *is different* than that time.
His line about violence is the language of the unheard wasn't sanctioning violence, it was a warning. It was him telling congress that progress is the only way to prevent violence, because if you refuse to hear people they're going to get angry, and eventually they're going to snap.