March power
In case you didn’t notice because national attention has been riveted 24/7 on the pork barrel scam, the United States recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.”
On Aug. 28, 1963, an estimated 250,000 to 300,000 black Americans assembled in Washington D.C. and called for an end to racial discrimination. The roots of the civil strife ran deep. It could be traced to the slave trade and the slavery of black people that triggered the American Civil War of the 1860s.
What happened on Aug. 28, 1963 when African-American civil rights groups, labor activists and religious organizations marched up to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial is one of America’s largest civil rights assemblies. It is also credited with accelerating the campaign and eventually gaining for African-Americans parity through the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Constitutional Voting Rights Law of 1965.
The twin legislation eventually tore down racial segregation structures in schools and workplaces particularly in many southern states. The movement was bitterly fought by so-called white supremacists who considered Negroes, as they were called then, outsiders and not integral or indigenous to white society.
However, as Americans look back to the momentous march 50 years ago, their collective memory is ignited not by the subsequent political upheavals that met the passage of landmark laws because parity didn’t come easily, but the stirring “I Have a Dream” speech of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
“King’s speech was a call for racial justice and harmony, and became a defining moment in America’s civil rights movement,” says the online article that Google published to complement its celebratory logo of Aug. 28, 2013. The logo had Dr. King’s famous speech as backdrop and an iconic rendition of the late civil rights champion waving to the crowd in Lincoln Memorial on 8/28/63.
Historians and scholars continue to examine the famous speech that derived inspiration from Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, biblical imagery of hell and salvation in Exodus and the Psalms from the Old Testament, the Sermon on the Mount from the New Testament, as well as literary influences by Shakespeare and other modern day authors and figures.
“I have a dream,” is a single phrase that earned for Dr. King a glorious place in US history, “joining Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln in the ranks of men who’ve shaped modern America” according to a recent Time Magazine cover article.
In the end, I like to think that the point of Dr. King’s speech is the clear and lucid presentation of the injustice committed against African-Americans even as America styled itself as the showcase for freedom, justice and equal rights around the world. In other words, there was disparity, even terrible deception in the way America preached democratic ideals in the midst of the grave injustice systematically committed against its own people, deemed lower in caste owing to the color of their skin.
* * *
The same is true in the country today as congressmen and senators try to deflect criticism from the pork barrel fund scam by saying they didn’t know their pork found its way to fake nongovernment organizations; some even say with a straight face that pork was spent for worthy projects that benefited the poor.
How can senators Juan Ponce Enrile, Ramon Revilla Jr., Jinggoy Estrada, Gringo Honasan, former Senator Edgardo Angara and 23 congressmen say their pork benefited the people when the funds went to bogus NGOs? Their supposed indifference to the NGO that received pork funds does not wash. Some P6 billion have been siphoned off to fake organizations for many years and they don’t care who got the money and where it went? Our lawmakers practically robbed the people and destroyed democratic institutions through the systematic misuse of pork funds.
Fifty years ago today, Ferdinand Marcos rose to become Senate President. Two years after, he was elected President of the Republic; seven years to his presidency he declared martial law.
The challenge of the generation who lived through the ‘60s was the struggle to win back democracy after it was snatched in 1972 by Marcos through a military dictatorship. The battle was won in 1986 through a peaceful revolution led by the widow of former opposition senator Benigno S. Aquino, Jr. In the second Edsa revolution, people unseated a President for accepting kickbacks from gambling lords, while another has been imprisoned for serious crimes against the people.
Every generation has to win its rights, says Gary Orfield, of the Civil Rights Project at the University of California in Los Angeles as he pondered the impact of Dr. King’s crusade on modern-day America.
For present-day Filipinos, the struggle is clearly for the abolition of the pork barrel system. It is a monumental challenge because those who control the funds are people who hold political power.
But ensuing political developments on the graft-ridden pork funds—from the exposé of the whistleblowers, the report of the Commission on Audit, the creation of the Inter-Agency Anti-Graft Coordinating Council that will probe the misuse of congressional funds, the filing of plunder cases against Janet Lim-Napoles and a number of lawmakers, to the intervention of the Supreme Court on the scandal—can no longer be held back.
As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said in his “I Have a Dream” speech, “We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream…. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive. Go back … let us not wallow in the valley of despair.”
