{"id":1969,"date":"2011-05-29T09:06:31","date_gmt":"2011-05-29T13:06:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2011\/05\/another-sunday-another-preacher-against-private-prisons.html"},"modified":"2011-05-29T09:06:31","modified_gmt":"2011-05-29T13:06:31","slug":"another-sunday-another-preacher-against-private-prisons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2011\/05\/another-sunday-another-preacher-against-private-prisons.html","title":{"rendered":"Another Sunday, another preacher against private prisons"},"content":{"rendered":"Neal Peirce wrote<\/a>:\n
\nAnd Sicilia had a stern judgment to make \u2014 as King did in his time \u2014\nabout the U.S. government: “Since the war was unleashed as a means to\nexterminate (drug trafficking), the United States, which is the grand\nconsumer of these toxic substances, has not done anything to support us.”\n<\/blockquote>\nThis was about Javier Sicilia and the war on drugs in Mexico.\n

\nMLK? Harsh? Maybe the writer is thinking about this speech,\n\nBeyond Vietnam — A Time to Break Silence<\/a>:\n

\n\n<\/a>\nMy third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows\nout of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three\nyears — especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the\ndesperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov\ncocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to\noffer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that\nsocial change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But\nthey ask — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They ask if our own\nnation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems,\nto bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home,\nand I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence\nof the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly\nto the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own\ngovernment. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government,\nfor the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence,\nI cannot be silent.\n<\/blockquote>\nOne year later to the day Martin Luther King Jr. was shot dead.\nThis is what he died for:\n\n\n
\nThis I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem\nourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper\nthan nationalism and which go beyond our nation’s self-defined goals\nand positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless,\nfor the victims of our nation and for those it calls “enemy,” for no\ndocument from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.\n<\/blockquote>\nWhat do you think Martin Luther King Jr. would have said about\nthe tens of thousands dead in Mexico from the failed War on Drugs?\nDo you think he would have believed\nputting up a border fence would stop it affecting us?\nAs we build still more prisons to lock up the largest proportion of any\nnational population anywhere?\nWhen 85% of those in the prison system are black,\nthose same “desperate, rejected, and angry young men”\nwho caused him to break his silence, or their desperate,\nrejected, and angry descendants, many of them right here in south Georgia?\nWhen Georgia and other states are privatizing justice\nfor the profit of private prison executives and shareholders?\n

\nMLK began his speech with this quote:\n

\n“A time comes when silence is betrayal.”\n<\/blockquote>\nWe don’t need a private prison in Lowndes County.\nSpend that tax money on education.\n

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