The Power of Words.

Last week, amerika's radical right supreme court, allowed the re-gerrymandering of amerika. It's a long step toward revitalizing and legitimizing the marginalization of amerika's non-white population--barring people from being able to vote, be elected and a raft of other rights that should be sacrosanct and for all.

Gerrymandering describes the intentional manipulation of district boundaries to discriminate against a group of voters on the basis of their political views or race. It allows the "state" to configure a voting district in such a way as to diminish or increase the voting influence of a certain bloc of voters. 

[Essentially, in many ways, the u.s. has always been gerrymandered. California with 40,000,000 people has just as many senators as Wyoming, with under 600,000 people. This is a nasty vestige granted as a conciliation to the sparsely populated slave states in the late 18th century--to give them disproportionate power and to get them to join the united states.]

With the abrogation by the supreme court of universal voting rights, the New York Times ran a timeline of the Voting Rights Act, passed under the aegis of Lyndon Johnson's presidency in 1965.

Growing up as I did, in a liberal bubble, I knew violent and hate-filled people killed african-american girls with bombs in churches. I knew people were tortured and lynched. I knew grown men were called 'boy,' and women we're called 'the girl.'

I knew all that and a thousand more examples of virulent and institutionalized hate. 

I knew that the memorial sign pointing to where 15-year-old Emmitt Till was murdered is constantly being defaced. 

But while I had read of all this, and of LBJ's speech before a joint session of congress in support of the Voting Rights bill, which crescendo'd with the words "We Shall Overcome," I never saw the footage below--I saw a small clip first on the Times' site.

I'd never seen before the political leaders in the audience sitting silent and stolid in defiance of everything we as humans are supposed to hold dear.

This is the reaction, applause, when he says "We shall overcome." The camera cuts to a wide shot of congress.

Most clap.

Some don't.

I thought the non-clappers were gone.

They are ascendant today in amerika.

I beg you to listen to LBJ's speech pasted above. 

The whole thing.

Think of his guiding words.

And try not to cry when you think of how far we, the people, have plummeted. 

--

PS.
I know you're busy.

But take five minutes and watch all of the speech above.

Then wonder, what happened.