Speech concerning on how the new administration has brought our long national nightmare to an end and a review of the recent era of American politics, 1993 (1 of 2)

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America in the Sixties. Fueled by the fire from the Southern Civil Rights Movement and the national anti-war drive, drawing leadership from the grassroots, it threatened to challenge the foundations of racial and economic arrogance that had created vast reservations of the unwanted on this country's soil.

That movement become the partial victim of its own success. It fought for and won the right to sit in front of the bus, to cast a vote, to sit at a lunch counter. It launched a southern Black political movement, but it failed to sustain and extend itself, and instead saw itself dissipated by struggles on the edge.

During the decade of the 1960's, a great social movement fought to win a place at the table for those citizens previously consigned to eating in the kitchen if indeed they ate at all.

Now that the legal and extralegal barriers have been largely removed, the battle for the remainder of the twentieth century is to close the widening gap.

None of us has much difficulty envisioning the world we want or the programs, which if adopted, would ring the new dawn in.

We want a society whose single aim is the democratic satisfaction of the needs of its people.

We want to guarantee all Americans an equal opportunity to participate in the organization of society, and in the shaping of public and private decisions which affect their lives.

We want to guarantee that no one goes without the basic necessities - food, shelter, healthcare, a healthy environment, personal safety and an adequate income.

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Instead, the hopes and dreams of generations that each succeeding year would be the year in which the land of the slave finally becomes the home of the free have been set aside in favor of defense spending, balanced budgets and corporate domination of the economy.

In spite of the progress made so far, the real problem remains to be solved. As Dr. W.E.B. Bubois put it, "The greater problem, which obscures the basic one, the problem of the color line, is the fact that so many civilized persons are willing to live in comfort, even when the price of this is the poverty, disease and ignorance of the majority of their fellow men." (1)

What we need to be about today - and for many, many years to come - is a version of politics which cannot be labeled by the old terms.

If there is an opening for an American era of politics different from the past, then it must be a citizen's democracy, insurgent, but with its focus aimed seriously at power.

When I speak here of "democratic" I do not mean the political party I belong to but rather the system of equally distributing wealth and power in an organized society, through institutions based on the premise that we all have equal ability - an equal right - to make decisions about our lives and our future.

This will require the creation of a large cadre of organizers with the strategy, skill and vision to build a democratic movement in the mainstream - a reassertion of the

1. W.E.B. Dubois, A Reader, Ed., Meyer Weinberg (1970) .

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plain truth that ordinary women and men have the common sense and ability to control their lives, given the knowledge and the means.

We have many problems yet to solve.

We are second from last among industrialized nations in the money we spend on our children's schools.

We've let our infrastructure, our streets and roads and bridges, fall apart.

For many in the middle class, only mom's paycheck keeps them out of the poorhouse.

Most Americans can't afford to be sick, can't pay the doctor.

Yet we seem to find more than enough to feed the military machine.

In just three years in the 1980s we spent more than $1 trillion dollars on military expenditures.

To understand how much one trillion can buy, use six of America's midwestern states as an illustration. We could build a $75,000 dollar house, place it on $5,000 dollars worth of land, furnish it with $10,000 dollars worth of furniture, put a $10,000 dollar car in the garage - and give this to each and every family in Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Colorado and Iowa.

We'd have enough left over to build a $10 million dollar hospital and a $10 million dollar library for 250 cities in those six states.

There'd still be some money left. After giving every family a furnished house and car, and each town a library and a

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hospital, we'd have enough left over to equip two armies. We'd have enough left from our trillion dollars to put aside, at 10% interest, enough money to pay a salary of $25,000 dollars for an army of 10,000 nurses and $25,000 dollars for an army of 10,000 teachers.

And those families with the houses and the cars? We'd have enough left over to give each family in those six states an annual cash allowance of $5,000 dollars - not just for one year, but for forever. (1)

For too many Americans, civil rights is a spectator sport, a kind of NBA in which all the players are Black and the spectators white.

But in this true to life game, the players are of every color and condition, the fate of all fans tied to points scored on the floor. When the right team wins, the spectators win too.

When four little girls died in a Birmingham church bombing, Sally Ride won the right to shoot the moon.

Because Black students faced arrest at Southern lunch counters almost 30 years ago, the law their bodies wrote now protects older Americans from age discrimination, Jews and Moslems and Christians from religious bigotry, and the disable from exclusion because of their condition.

When the struggle for civil rights began to intensify three decades ago, we knew it would be hard fought and never cost free.

But we hoped the American people would bear the burden and

1. Paraphrased from Harry G. Shaffer, Republic Airlines Magazine, May, 1986.

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pay the price. And for a while, Americans answered, "We will." But when it began to pinch and squeeze, their commitment began to fade.

The 1960s movement and the ferment which preceded it grew from the willingness of ordinary people -- housewives, students, a seamstress, teachers, a railroad porter -- to seize control of their lives.

They did not wait for mythic charismatic leaders to organize a march or boycott; they organized themselves.

They did not wait for mass approval -- they faced rejection, knowing they were right.

Today, we wait for others to certify our politics, to give sanction to our protests.

It took one woman's courage to start a movement in Montgomery, the bravery of only four young men in Greensboro to set the South on fire.

Surely there are men and women -- young and old -- here today who can do the same. If there are hungry minds and hungry bodies starving near these wealthy walls, someone here can feed them.

If there are precincts of the powerless poor nearby, someone here can organize them.

If there is racial injustice on the campus or in the town, someone here can conquer it.

If America still spends more on guns than butter, someone here can reverse that ancient trend.

Now is the time in the third century of our republic to make

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