Back in the 1960s and early 1970s the United States had a host of government programs aimed directly at low-income people. But during the Nixon administration, Republicans began an assault on those programs and many of them were eventually phased out.
The problems that those programs were designed to deal with still remained, and over the years we have watched the numbers of African Americans and other people of color rise sharply in the prison population. We have seen a huge upturn in gang wars over drug selling turf, and under the Bush administration the ranks of the poor have swelled to record numbers (more than a million every year) without an event like a world-wide depression.
The corporate interest-driven Republicans pushed for a change in how we spent our public money, and their corporate backers also used their money to force Democrats to fall in line. Tax cuts for the wealthy and new military weapons became the preferred public expense. The wealthy and the defense contractors were often the same people.
But the poor remained, and to many of us they seemed silent as the United States proceeded to dismantle almost all of the safety nets designed to aid the poor. What has been an even greater disappointment to me is how a new and growing African American middle class has failed. They have failed to help create opportunity for the less fortunate within our community and they have failed to push the city, county, state and federal governments to help.
The news pictures of so many poor African Americans virtually swimming for their lives and becoming almost uncivilized in order to survive Hurricane Katrina's devastation makes it difficult for me to sleep. There is a population like this in every large city found in its drug-infested back streets. These are the people that successive Republican administrations have told you are lazy and need to get off their rear ends and find a job. These people are being punished for not having the same jobs that Republican administrations have allowed corporate America to ship overseas while giving them massive tax breaks.
Where do we start to fix this problem before another major catastrophe strips away our fronts and exposes the nasty underbelly of another major city?
I believe that we start with the very communities in which the problems exist. We start by changing the attitudes of our inner-city poor and changing the direction and habits of the entire African American community.
It's time for a decision to be made: Either African Americans decide to become completely engaged in America or we leave and find a home somewhere else. We cannot do both and be successful.
At the end of our enslavement we never had a real choice to leave or stay, and we became a semi-free people in a land we never fully embraced. How do you embrace a country that legally enslaved you, legally allowed you to be maimed or killed by any white citizen you had offended, and legally disenfranchised you, both politically and economically?
We became free with an asterisk by our name and we are still trying to erase it, we became free to leave without the resources to do so or the knowledge to know what part of Africa we came from.
For the first time in our history many of us have the means to leave and for the first time in our history we have the skills and ability to change the United States into the kind of country we desire.
What kind of country do we really want, and what kind of a group must we transform ourselves into to make this happen?
Being active American citizens means that we must collectively, and individually, buy into a concept of America for the first time in our 400-year-old history here. That concept is our vision of the kind of country we want and are committed to building. Once we have done that, every ounce of energy we have must be put into making that vision a reality.
We can no longer live in this nation with one foot in and one foot out. We can no longer stand on the sidelines and act as though America must work for us without us working for America.
Guiding America in any direction requires hands-on effort. You have to touch, feel, hear and smell America. You transform America by changing the soul of America, and you have to be close to America to accomplish that.
New Orleans is telling us something so clear that none of us can miss it. Living in poverty, being uneducated and unskilled is bad for your health. Not doing the things we need to do to change our conditions is the same thing as racial suicide, and we should not have to find ourselves in waste deep water to figure that out.
It's time for a summit. It's time for a plan that deals with what kind of Americans we are going to be, or it's time to buy a ticket. Our lives obviously depend on it. We have the nation's attention and we must do something with this opportunity.
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