Dear Progressive Reader,
Protests continue across the United States in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. Protestors, most peaceful, have been met with teargas and rubber bullets from police and National Guard troops.
The Progressive, from its earliest days, has always advocated nonviolence and anti-militarism. Our founder Fighting Bob La Follette spoke passionately against war. The magazine has also always been an advocate of the power of non-violent direct action—a strategy for change advocated by Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., who drew his influence from Mohandas K. Gandhi, who in turn was influenced by Henry David Thoreau. In his 1849 essay “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau wrote: “Unjust laws exist; shall we be content to obey them . . . or shall we transgress them at once?” In his newspaper, Young India, Gandhi wrote in 1924, “Permanent good can never be the outcome of untruth and violence.” And King, in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” first printed in The Progressive in July 1963, wrote, “[W]e who engage in nonviolent action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open where it can be seen and dealt with.”
But, King also noted, in that same letter, “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.” This past week, AIDS activist Larry Kramer passed away of pneumonia. Kramer helped found the activist organization ACT-UP, whose slogan, based on the 1987 political poster, “Silence = Death” came to represent the importance of naming the evil, oppression, or disease in order to confront it. Yesterday, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a protestor in support of justice for George Floyd held a sign that read: “I am not black, but I hear you.”
The coronavirus pandemic has thrown into stark relief the inequality in our country. We are a nation of unequal access to health care, unequal access to wealth and resources, unequal access to survival. Racism is a disease that has ravaged our body politic. As King wrote in The Progressive in December 1962, “The unresolved race question is a pathological infection in our social and political anatomy, which has sickened us throughout our history.”
James Baldwin addressed this sickness in his essay “A Letter to My Nephew,” first published in The Progressive in 1962, saying, “this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.” And this theme echoes through to today in the streets of Minneapolis, where an African American man was denied his breath because of an ingrained attitude that has infected so many police officers in so many cities and states. “I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion,” wrote Thoreau in 1849, but that opportunity was not afforded to Floyd, or Eric Garner in New York City in 2014, or so many countless other black men and women who have been killed by armed police.
These killings, together with the now more than 100,000 deaths from COVID-19, have created immeasurable loss in our society. Sarah Jaffee this week writes a moving piece on the importance of rituals of mourning. “Collective grieving,” she writes, “is a way of holding space to remember that things could—and should—be otherwise.” In these communal acts of grief, she continues, “people can come together and find a little bit of collective joy within their pain, and from that, take the will to go forward and keep fighting.”
Keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.
Sincerely,
Norman Stockwell
Publisher
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