Dr. Martin Luther King – Engaging Peace

FROM DARKNESS AT NOON TO THE GLOW OF HOPE, Part 1

Posted on July 9, 2018 by kathiemm

A Female demonstrator offers a flower to military police on guard at the Pentagon during an anti-Vietnam demonstration. Arlington, Virginia, USA. Oct 21, 1967. In the public domain. Author: S.Sgt. Albert R. Simpson.

The Tragic Triumph of the Reagan Counter-Revolution

Against The Spirit of the Sixties, Now Counterbalanced by

the Rekindling of Candles in the Wind

by Stefan Schindler

The 1960s were a time of hope in America and the world. A time of questioning and protest. A renaissance of The Renaissance. The blossoming of a counter-culture committed to peace, freedom, and creative expression.

The Spirit of The Sixties carried over into the 1970s. America and the world saw the continuation and growth of the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the anti-nuclear movement, the environmental movement; and, of course, the feminist protest against sexism, perhaps best captured in the bumper sticker: “Women who seek to be equal to men lack ambition.”

Alas, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated, as were the leaders of the Black Panthers and the American Indian Movement.

Richard Nixon was elected president twice; then Gerald Ford pardoned him for crimes against humanity.

Jimmy Carter was convinced by his national security adviser to start a covert war against the newly elected social democratic government of Afghanistan, which led to a Russian counter-intervention, which led to America’s creating, funding, and arming of Al Qaeda.

The liberal wing of the Democratic Party saw citizen activism as a “crisis of democracy.” Ronald Reagan applauded American-financed terrorists as “freedom fighters,” and launched the Bush-whacking of FDR’s socialist inspired “New Deal” for the American people.

Bush The First continued Reagan’s attack on America’s middle class and poor, as well as continuing Reagan’s wars abroad, saying, after America shot down an Iranian passenger jet, killing 290 civilians, including 66 children: “I will never apologize for America, I don’t care what the facts are.”

Newt Gingrich, in one of history’s greatest ironies, was elected Speaker of the House, successfully championing lies, insults, and divisive sophistry as the road to power during the failed presidency of Bill Clinton, whose Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, said that half a million dead Iraqi children from American bombings and sanctions was “a small price to pay” for freedom, although Iraq was in fact no threat to America’s national security, and Saddam Hussein had long been Ronald Reagan’s favorite dictator.

The Cheney-Bush administration lie-launched America’s Second Vietnam War, this time in the Middle East, convincing Congress to pass the least patriotic legislation in American history, called “The USA Patriot Acts.”

Obama wasted eight years compromising, betraying his base, and succumbing to a cowardice of conscience that made possible the tragic triumph of a new Trumpeting of racism, sexism, militarism, economic apartheid, and fanatical pseudo-patriotism.

Recalling Jeremiah’s warning that “Ye shall reap the whirlwind,” I’m reminded of another bumper sticker: “God is coming; and, boy, is She mad.”

If he were alive….

Posted on January 14, 2016January 12, 2016 by kathiemm

If he were alive. If he had not been struck down by an assassin’s bullet. If he had not embraced the mantle of peace and social justice in a country where murderers abound, and where their targets are frequently people of color, crusaders for social justice, gun control advocates, and proponents of nonviolence.

If he were still alive, he would probably weep at the slow hamstringing of progress towards the goals for which he fought. Yet, if he were still alive, I know we would see him continuing his struggle to make the US a better place–a struggle in which we should all participate.

Monday is his day, and in his honor I am posting another excerpt from the essay Building a Racially Just Society by Roy Eidelson, Mikhail Lyubansky, and yours truly. Let’s keep his beacon burning.

“Psychology plays an important role in the social forces perpetuating individual and institutional racism. Because of the link between race and class, the psychological mechanisms that perpetuate class injustices also tend to perpetuate racial injustices. The widespread preference to see the world as just, for instance, leads people to… blame those who struggle with socioeconomic disadvantages – disproportionately people of color in the U.S. – for their own plight. This perception then dampens the popular will to support a role for elected governments in setting reasonable minimum standards of economic rights, fostering a political culture that greatly harms working families of all races.

Other psychological mechanisms relatively independent of class also reinforce racist attitudes and actions. Negative cultural stereotypes of African Americans are pervasive and entrenched, in part because of a psychological inclination to unconsciously legitimize status quo disparities….

These biases not only serve as the foundation for intentional expressions of prejudice and racial violence but also for unintended yet harmful micro-aggressions, which often cast African Americans as deserving of fear, distrust, and disrespect. Too often, inaccurate and biased news reports and media portrayals further serve to reinforce perceived differences of the racial “other.” At the same time, stresses associated with disproportionate suffering from class injustices, with being treated as “second-class” citizens, and with being targets of discrimination increase the likelihood of negative physical and psychological health outcomes for African American children and adults.”

If you have not read the entire essay yet, indulge yourself soon.

Seize the day! Creatively maladjust! Pt. 2.

Posted on January 22, 2015January 22, 2015 by kathiemm

By Guest Author Dr. Deborah Belle

Economic inequality is an excellent predictor of just about every physical, emotional, and social ill that social scientists measure. More unequal nations have lower life expectancies, higher infant mortality rates, more homicides, poorer math and literacy scores, more teenage pregnancies and births, more obesity, more mental illness, more drug and alcohol addiction, more incarceration, and less economic mobility than more equal nations.

The United States, the developed world’s most unequal major nation, ranks at or near the bottom on all of these indicators of the quality of our lives. Moreover, this pattern is replicated among the 50 U.S. states. The most equal states consistently outperform the least equal states on a variety of indices of well-being. Nor are the negative effects of economic inequality limited to the poor. Rather, persons of all social classes suffer more in unequal nations or states than their social class peers in places of more equality.

The deadly effects of income inequality appear to be due to the stresses of life in a winner-take-all economy, losses in social cohesion and trust, and the skewing of social policies in favor of the wealthy at the expense of the poor and the middle class. Public spending for education is lower and economic assistance to poor parents is more meager in U.S. states with higher levels of income inequality. Not surprisingly, children in more unequal states show lower levels of educational achievement and high school completion than their peers from more egalitarian states.

Where there is great inequality, the government is often mobilized to repress efforts to reverse that inequality, as we saw in the brutal suppression of the Civil Rights Movement of Dr. King’s time and the Occupy movement in recent years.

Nevertheless, these problems can be solved. As labor leader Richard Trumpka recently said “We are tired of people talking about inequality as if nothing can be done. The answer is simple: Raise the wages of the 90 percent of Americans whose wages today are lower than they were in 1997.” Plus raise the top income tax rate, enact a transaction fee on stock market transactions, and restore laws keeping vast sums of private wealth out of our elections.

Given the stranglehold of the wealthy on our political system, enacting such measures probably will require the kind of social movement that toppled Jim Crow half a century ago. But it can be done.

As Dr. King said, “our world is in dire need of a new organization, The International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment. Men and women should be as maladjusted as the prophet Amos, who in the midst of the injustices of his day could cry out in words that echo across the centuries, ‘Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream’; or as maladjusted as Abraham Lincoln, who in the midst of his vacillations finally came to see that this nation could not survive half slave and half free; or as maladjusted as Thomas Jefferson, who in the midst of an age amazingly adjusted to slavery, could scratch across the pages of history, words lifted to cosmic proportions, ‘We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal. …’”

“Through such creative maladjustment,” King concluded, “we may be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man, into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.”

Deborah Belle is a professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Boston University. Her research focuses on the impact of poverty and inequality on individual mental health and family functioning, the ways adults and children make sense of poverty, wealth, and economic inequality, and the stresses that arise at the intersection of paid employment and family life. She is also interested in gender differences in social behavior and teaches courses on social psychology, the psychology of women, and the psychology of families. Her posts are excerpts from a speech given at Boston University January 19, 2015.

Seize the day! Creatively maladjust!

Posted on January 19, 2015January 22, 2015 by kathiemm

Poster graffiti, Mary St, Newtown NSW, July 2007 (Photo: Duncan Kimball). In the public domain.

Today’s post is the first in a series of two by guest author Deborah Belle.

On September 1, 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke to the annual convention of the American Psychological Association, saying how pleased he was to take “a brief break from the day-to-day demands of our struggle for freedom and human dignity and discuss the issues involved in that struggle with concerned friends of good will…”

King credited psychology for the word “maladjusted,” noting that “destructive maladjustment should be destroyed and… all must seek the well-adjusted life in order to avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities.” But, King argued, “I am sure that we will recognize that there are some things in our society, some things in our world, to which we should never be adjusted. There are some things concerning which we must always be maladjusted if we are to be people of good will. We must never adjust ourselves to racial discrimination and racial segregation. We must never adjust ourselves to religious bigotry. We must never adjust ourselves to economic conditions that take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few.”

We have known for many years that in wealthy nations like ours, poor people experience more physical and emotional illness than non-impoverished people, and die at a younger age. This is hardly surprising, given the many risk factors associated with poverty—substandard housing and malnutrition, environmental toxins and pollutants, noise and crowding, violence and the threat of violence, and poor access to health care.

But the poverty—illness connection has other sources as well. Human beings respond to threat by mobilizing physiologically. Stress hormones course through our bodies. Our heart rate increases as our bodies prepare for fight or flight. When the threat has passed, our bodies return to their previous unstressed calm. However, when threat is chronic, as it often is for poor adults and children, levels of stress hormones remain chronically elevated, and there is no return to a healthy state of calmness.

Given the grim risks associated with poverty, it is distressing to realize that the child poverty rate in this country today is substantially higher than when Dr. King died. In 1969, 14% of children under 18 were poor. Today, 22% of all U.S. children live in poverty. And poverty remains racialized. More than one in three Black or Hispanic children now live in poverty, compared to one in eight White, non-Hispanic children.

Our country is alone among industrialized nations in having child poverty rates of this magnitude. We also have the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country. The richest 1 percent of the U.S. population owns 40 percent of all wealth, and most of this wealth is concentrated among the top one tenth of one percent. As Rebecca Solnit observed in Harper’s magazine, “Society has been divided into a desperate majority and an obscene minority that hoards wealth so colossal it’s meaningless.”

Deborah Belle is a professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Boston University. Her research focuses on the impact of poverty and inequality on individual mental health and family functioning, the ways adults and children make sense of poverty, wealth, and economic inequality, and the stresses that arise at the intersection of paid employment and family life. She is also interested in gender differences in social behavior and teaches courses on social psychology, the psychology of women, and the psychology of families. Her posts are excerpts from a speech given at Boston University January 19, 2015.