After Jericho

(c) 6 November 2008, The Griot Poet

The significance of the election of the first African American president holds meaning in the biblical story of Moses and his protégée Joshua.

Moses could not go into the Promised Land but was allowed to see it from a mountaintop. The nation of Israel, freshly freed from Egyptian slavery, still had a “slave’s mentality.” They esteemed themselves “as grasshoppers” in the sight of their adversaries as ten out of twelve spies reported. The minority – Caleb and Joshua – said for all intents and purposes: “Forget that! We can take them!”

The new nation’s lack of faith gained them the chastisement of wandering the wilderness for 40 years until Joshua and a new generation walked through a parted Jordan in similar fashion to parting the Red Sea into the Promised Land. The land “flowing with milk and honey” was rich in resources that needed workers to harness them, and had many battles – starting with Jericho – to maintain their claim to it. The new, younger nation had to WORK for their reward.

A wall has fallen, just as significant as the Jericho wall that a new nation marched around in silence for seven days, increasing their circuit proportionately matching each day’s number, shouting on the seventh and fighting to claim their prize.

I was five-years-old and a month from graduating Bethlehem Community Center, a still mostly all-black kindergarten in Winston-Salem, North Carolina when Martin – our Moses – ended his address to the Sanitation Worker’s Union in Tennessee with “I’ve been to the mountain top.” History reports he afterward collapsed in the arms of his aids, exhausted and depressed due to death threats and self-inflicted stress from his extramarital affairs. Tearfully, my class would learn from our teachers our Moses prophesied his own demise to the coincidental annual date of his opposition to the Vietnam War.

It has been forty years since Martin, and Obama is inaugurated the day after we celebrate Martin Luther King Day. Joshua. Obama as our first man of color as Chief Executive represents a mere 2.3%: 1/44 presidents in the office.

We are the remnant that has wandered the wilderness after forty years of measured progress in Civil Rights post Emmitt Till: separate water fountains and schools, forced integration, prison recidivism, black exploitation films, de facto re-segregation, the Rodney King Riots, O.J. Simpson, James Byrd in Jasper, Texas, questionable police killings, Oscar snubs, negative images in the media and seeing others progress their own agendas – women, immigrants, Hispanics, Gays and Lesbians – using the same tactics birthed in the basements of black churches. Now they with us are a coalition along with seventeen percent Republican voters that supported the candidacy of Obama and are the first evidence that maybe, we as a nation have “grown up” a little from our ignorant past.

However, Google “anti-Obama sites” and see what you pick up. The right-wing is in a dual quandary of an identity crisis and the open sores of a significant political loss. No less than Newt Gingrich is poised to oppose any Obama policy that is even center-right. As I see it: the identity crisis Republicans suffer are from the confusing mix of (1) traditional fiscal conservatism (a stance I think they should return to), (2) evangelicalism and its aversion to science, (3) neo-liberalism and its devotion to laissez-faire “trickle-down” Stockton, Chicago Friedman style economics and (4) neo-conservatism and its now defunct “Project for a New American Century” which staffed much of Bush 43’s foreign policy philosophy in the quest to expand the American Empire in a post-modern version of the Pax Romana (Peace of Rome) to a Pax Americana by force of arms.

So, it’s up to us.

As Maya Angelo stated poetically, we are truly on this new “Pulse of Morning,” the black, the white, the straight, the gay, young and old, men and women that supported this historic election can’t just shrink away and think Obama can govern by himself. He can no more do that than raise record sums in campaign contributions by himself.

Walls fall after a might shout. Victories are won after effort, struggle and a fight. You’ll still need to be engaged after the glow of the election is over. Email President Obama from www.whitehouse.gov after January 20, 2009; call your local Congressional Representatives and Senators.

Stay engaged: pray for Obama. We have a history of martyrs and a culture of violence that must change. Politics in the age of the Internet is no longer a bench-warmer sport; you can’t just vote and hope everything works out OK. Blog and email; chat and post; write poetry and essays. Your ideas are viral contagion, as has been observed and can be spread and shared by all of us benefiting all of us.

The old model observed by Noam Chomsky – Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at M.I.T. – was defined as “the bewildered herd” reacting to sloganeering, mantra, rumor and dogma versus making informed decisions as an electorate. This, of course, benefited business interests that controlled the electoral process with their well-heeled dollar donations to the campaigns. YOU shattered that. This was without a doubt, the most informed decision as an electorate we’ve made for our future. We survived the specter of Jeremiah Wright and charges of socialism, communism and “Joe the Plumber.” That herd was expected to respond like Pavlov’s dogs, then “fade away” after the election and let the business chosen elites govern them. You are not helpless anymore and President Elect Obama needs our help. The economy is in a shambles, the jobless number is bound to be terrible tomorrow and since two-thirds of our economy is dependant on consumerism, it’s unfortunately going to get worse before it starts to get better.

Your mission is simple: make President Obama not only a barrier breaker, but he and Vice President Joe Biden the most successful administration in the history of this nation that proved on November 4, 2008 that we are as good as our promise to all peoples; “We the people.”

Tomorrow

“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
”To the last syllable of recorded time; and all our yesterdays have lighted fools
the way to dusty death. Out, out brief candle!

”Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

William Shakespeare, Macbeth

Tomorrow.

Not just tomorrow: November 5th.

I explained to a friend: Martin for all intents and purposes became "Moses" with his "I've been to the mountaintop" sermon. Prophetically uttered the day before his assassination.

In "April 4, 1968" by Michael Eric Dyson, Martin was said to be suffering from depression. Possibly preaching lifted his spirits a bit, but the constant death threats and juggling what was by history's reckoning a very recreational extra marital sex life, he was approaching a nervous breakdown.

40 years.

We've likened ourselves to the ancient Hebrews in so many ways: about 12 million Jews in the entire world today; we're about 12 percent of the US population. They were enslaved in Egypt 400 years; we were enslaved in a new Egypt 400 years. God sent Moses; we assume He sent Martin. Joshua and Caleb took the remnant into the Promised Land after 40 years of wandering in the wilderness.

40 years ago I was five years old. Mrs. Wooten and the teachers sat our kindergarten class down and explained "Dr. King was killed."

I learned later, coincidentally it was one year to-the-date he spoke out against the Vietnam war. I knew that this significant personality would not be around to see my formative academic years: we all cried at the news, and graduated the next month in May. We all started the fall in a world without our saints: Medgar, Malcolm and Martin.

Forty years: Blacksploitation movies, Vietnam protests, all-volunteer force, recession, Reagan, "trickle-down" economics, the Republican Revolution, 45% of the prison-industrial-complex, recidivism, lack of self-help, still lacking education, not taking care of the babies we make, blamed for welfare while giving corporate welfare, the usual suspect for rape, murder, theft, frisked in King's Department store at 14 ("shut up, boy! I know niggra's steal"), a reprieve from the Bill Cosby show, booty-call-I'm-gonna-get-you-sucka-blacksploitation-movies (again), a few Oscars from liberal Hollywood, a brief solace under the Clinton years, "Oruborous [the world eater] unfettered" as every crazy Friedman/Stockton/trickle-down theory got its day under DUBYA.

400 years. 40 years. 8 years in purgatory. Moses. Martin. Joshua. Obama.

We have this reverential fear of "tomorrow." What will it mean on November 5th?