Gospel Music Giant: Horace Boyer 1935-2009

From The Lead: Horace Boyer, editor of the Episcopal Hymnal, Lift Every Voice and Sing, a beloved musician who loved teaching others to sing with passion, enthusiasm and excellence, has died at age 74.

I found YouTube links to two songs featuring the Boyer Brother --



You can also listen to "Going Back To God"

Something white and sticky to chew on...

"White on white crime is destroying the very fabric of our nation and producing an entire class of white career criminals. While the media is quick to report every little statistic and/or event relating to the black on black crime phenomenon, the words “white on white crime” are spoken with a frequency of slim to none, and slim disappeared when he was two months old, murdered by his depressed mother, wrapped in plastic, and buried in the backyard.

Indeed, many white people pay absolutely no attention to crime or other manifestations of less than decent behavior in their neighborhood until someone of another race arrives on the scene. Crime is a natural characteristic of people of color. In fact, William Bennett, who was the education secretary under Ronald Reagan, the drug czar under George Bush Sr. and a staunch Republican conservative, used his radio show to make the suggestion that if people wanted to reduce crime they could abort every black baby in the United States. However, although it might be reprehensible to some people and totally impossible to pull off, if one was truly interested in reducing crime to an even lower level here in the United States, all one has to do is abort every white baby and exterminate every white man and woman. But to seriously make such a suggestion invites ridicule, hatred, and possibly invoke the ire of some latent white criminals."

"The likelihood of committing and falling victim to crime also depends on several demographic characteristics, as well as location of the population. Overall, men, minorities, the young, and those in financially less favorable positions are more likely to be victimized by, as well as commit, crimes. Crime in the US is also concentrated in certain areas. It is quite common for crime in American cities to be highly concentrated in a few, often economically disadvantaged areas. For example, San Mateo County, California had a population of approximately 624,000 and 17 homicides in 2001. 6 of these 17 homicides took place in poor, largely African and Hispanic American East Palo Alto, which had a population of roughly 30,000. So, while East Palo Alto accounted for 4.8% of the population, about one-third of the homicides took place there."

“A February 1997 report on rape and sexual-based crime published by the United States Department of Justice stated that of the crimes surveyed, 56% of arrestees were White, 42% were Black, and 2% were of other races; though it should be noted that "Hispanic" was not recognized as a racial category, with Hispanics predominantly being grouped together with Non-Hispanic Whites. The report additionally noted that "victims of rape were about evenly divided between whites and blacks; in about 88% of forcible rapes, the victim and offender were of the same race.”

"Overall the financially disadvantaged, males, those younger than 25 and non European-Americans were more likely to fall victim to crime. Income, sex and age had the most dramatic effect on the chances of a person being victimized by crime, while the characteristic of race depended on the crime. In 2005, 27 out of 1,000 African Americans became the victim of a violent crime, compared to 20 out of every 1,000 White Americans."
________________________________________________________________________

And “white-collar” crime (a statistical nightmare for white males being nearly all of those perpetrating the crimes) isn’t even factored in when it comes to causing disadvantage weighing greatly upon the non-white population.

Depending on the statistics and the socio-economic factors we’re all black now, eh?

We are all connected, right? The human race is failing, my friend. Not the black or Latino human race, but the human race….

brotherpeacemaker

February is Black History Month

Alice Walker Reads Sojourner Truth

Sojourner Truth (Isabella Baumfree) biography

h/t to Sherry

HOW IS IT POSSIBLE?

This poem is for President Elect Barack Obama... and hope.

How is it possible-
that, in an age of such a shredded foundation,
that, in an age of such unprecedented warring,
that, in an age of such unequaled corruption and
terrible sadness, a moment as this could come?

How is it possible-
that, after such machinations of greed and hubris,
we have the power to have witnessed this;
the moment now bending its light upon us,
directing us forward to our better selves?

How is it possible-
that we now proceed with this stunning milestone,
that we march onward in the footprints of revolution
though the course is not curved of our choosing
and the strident shriek of the dying covers our skies?

How is it possible-
that we have stumbled to our rightful place of account,
wandered in on such lustrous and cheerful promise
standing now before our grasp, yet still untaken,
unused, and ready for our hands to shape into our art?

How is it possible-
with the end written before the bright and new beginning,
with our expectations rutted in dishonest obligation,
with the world’s eyes having peered down into our shame,
that our pathway is not ruled by immeasurable detonation?

How is it possible-
that, with such divergence and fragmentary mourning,
with stained waters and sky distorting our reflection,
with our differences still hidden in the visage of ghosts,
we were able to land here without knowing what’s next?

How is it possible-
that the air that we scorch doesn’t blink or make a sound
as we push and shove our burning way through it
with sorrow at our flank speaking of others as mere fodder
for our wholly unrestrained hubristic nourishment?

How is it possible-
that this plot has begun at the end of such torturous ire,
at the back of gloom instead of the heart of illumination?
That this moment even has words like hope and change within it
is certainly the most astounding thing of all!

© 2008 mrp/tpm

Palin/McCain rally and the "N" word...

This kind of ignorance truly disgusts me.


We had all best hang on tight, the ride's about to get very, very, very bumpy...

Maybe it will be time (soon?) for us to review past times of rebellion and revolutionary disturbance...

Now you have touched the women
You have struck a rock
You have dislodged a boulder
You will be crushed!

Expand the post +/-

NOW YOU HAVE TOUCHED THE WOMEN (1)
African Women`s Resistance to the Pass Laws in South Africa 1950-1960

by Elizabeth S. Schmidt

Introduction

The decade of the 1950s was a decade of turmoil in South Africa. In the urban areas, a strong alliance was being forged between racially oppressed groups and sympathetic whites. As a united front against apartheid, the non-racial Congress Alliance, (2) formed from previously organised racially-based and worker groups, defied unjust laws and conducted campaigns against forced removals under the Group Areas Act and against inferior "Bantu" education for African children. The alliance organised bus boycotts, stay-at-homes, and rent strikes in the African townships. Perhaps the most significant Congress campaign of the decade was the campaign against the pass laws, and in particular, the extension of reference books to African women. No other campaign was carried out on such a massive scale or was sustained over as many years. No other campaign struck at the very root of the apartheid system.

Protest against the pass laws was not an innovation of the 1950s. The African National Congress (ANC) had been organising opposition to the legislation since its founding in 1912. The significance of the campaigns of the 1950s lay in the adoption of new strategies for bringing about fundamental change. For the first time, anti-pass protesters employed techniques of mass action, strikes, boycotts, and civil disobedience on a wide scale, abandoning the appeals, petitions and deputations that had characterised ANC protests for more than forty years. Efforts at gentle suasion and pleas for patient waiting were cast aside as remnants of a bygone era. The degree of popular involvement in the anti-pass actions and the level of spontaneous activity in the rural areas was unparallelled in any other period of South African history. Finally, in the 1950s, the primary catalysts of the anti-pass protests were not the traditional male leaders, but thousands of African women, many of whom had never before been involved in political protests or demonstrations.

In the urban areas, the women`s campaigns were primarily organised by the ANC Women`s League and the nonracial Federation of South African Women. In the rural areas, resistance was largely spontaneous. Although the Government charged that the unrest was due to the work of "outside agitators", the rural women were, for the most part, acting on their own initiative and according to their own understanding of how the extension of the pass laws could affect their lives. While women who worked in the urban areas brought home new tactics, insights and information when they returned to the reserves, they were contributing to a momentum that had gathered on its own.

The militancy of the women, their level of organisation in the urban areas, and the ease with which they discarded their expected subordinate role came as a shock to many of the men and even to some of the women. Although women were deeply involved in all of the Congress campaigns of the 1950s, the leadership of the Congress organisations was dominated almost exclusively by men. (3)

As the women`s campaigns gathered strength, the ANC National Executive Committee pointedly acknowledged the role of women in the liberation struggle. It was obvious, from the wording of its statements, that the importance of women to the struggle had not previously been assumed. In its report to the Annual Conference of December 17-18, 1955, the ANC National Executive Committee remarked that the ANC Women`s League, which was formed in part to "take up special problems and issues affecting women", was not "just an auxiliary to the African National Congress, and we know that we cannot win liberation or build a strong movement without the participation of the women..." (4)

African women played a leading role in the resistance to pass legislation because of the particular way in which influx control measures, implemented through the pass system, affected their position in society as well as African family life. On the basis of race, African women suffered the same disabilities as African men. Because of their sex, however, they carried a double burden. At the bottom of the social and economic hierarchy, African women were predominantly employed in low-paying, unskilled jobs. Because of the tenuous nature of their employment - largely in the domestic service and informal sectors - African women were particularly vulnerable to removal from the urban areas as "idle" Africans or "superfluous appendages". Legal constraints made it far more difficult for African women than men to acquire urban residency rights, accommodations in the urban areas, and land in the African reserves. Influx control laws, and by extension the pass system, were intentionally used by government officials to bar African women from the urban areas and to confine them to the African reserves.

Life in the reserves was an existence of poverty and hardship for the vast majority of the people. Enforced landlessness had transformed African men from self-reliant peasants to migrant labourers in the white areas. Influx control laws meant that their families were forced to stay in the reserves, where the men could visit them once a year. The burden of raising children under such conditions, which fell almost exclusively on the women, became increasingly arduous. As the soil lost its fertility and landlessness became more acute, the reserve economy deteriorated. The women`s role as cultivators and providers eroded, and with it, women`s social status. Rather than being major contributors to the families` livelihood, women became increasingly dependent upon male earnings. However, these earnings were neither large nor secure. In many cases, money from the "white" areas came sporadically or not at all.

During the period that women were free from pass law restrictions, some had been able to skirt the influx control regulations and join their husbands in the urban areas. Some found menial jobs which, although low-paying and insecure, were more lucrative than subsistence farming. These women knew that the extension of passes to women would increase the effectiveness of the influx control system. No longer would there be an exit from the reserves, a way for women to earn money to feed their children or to live with their husbands in the urban areas. As a result, when in 1952 the Government announced that African women would be forced to carry passes, the women responded with vehemence. Subjection to pass law controls would destroy their last remaining hope - their freedom of movement. Unlike African men, the women who resisted these laws had nothing further to lose. Protesters in the rural areas were not risking the loss of urban residency rights, houses or jobs. They could afford to be bold where men were apt to be hesitant. The women could only gain by their militancy.

Resistance to the pass laws was the overwhelming, but not the only issue of the 1950s. African women became involved in a number of campaigns focussing on issues that affected their ability to care for their children and to keep their family unit together. They protested the pass laws, "Bantu" education, rent hikes, bus fare increases, forced removals of African communities, government-owned beer halls that soaked up their husbands` wages and laws that prevented them from selling home brew, an important source of income for many women. In the rural areas, women resisted the Government`s "betterment" schemes, which included the mandatory culling of precious livestock, required women to fill and maintain cattle dipping tanks without pay, and enforced soil conservation measures which dispossessed many families of arable land.

the rest is here...

If wimmin were the ones strategizing and deciding when or if anyone should go to war...

This woman also moved me...

To understand my Black feminist politics as not simply about thinking and theorizing, but also to make the links from there to how my emotions and spirit function or flounder...due to the effects of systemic domination. Without a profound comprehension of the emotional and psychological our struggles for peace will continue to be off balance, without heart and doomed to fail. They like us not thinking or talking about emotions. When their serfs shut down, they work harder, work more, reflect less, dream less. Without the ability to profoundly connect to ourselves and to each other in whatever ways possible there is no love in our struggle and without love...well, what exactly is resistance without love if not the intellectual hobby of those who have the leisure to just knock around some ideas and theories.

READ THE FULL POST +/-

This woman, Rozena Maart, simultaneously saved me from a life without make-up and earrings :) and offered me language I could use to write and fight. She moved me at a time when I was ready to be moved. Enjoy...?
Love, darkdaughta

COPYRIGHT 2007 Herizons Magazine, Inc.

Born in South Africa, Rozena Maart is a writer, intellectual and cultural critic. She is also director of the Biko Institute in Guelph, Ontario. Maart's most recent book, Rosa's District Six TSAR, 2005), was recently published by New Africa Books in South Africa. Herizons contributor Roewan Crowe interviewed Maart shortly upon her return from Cape Town, where Rosa's District Six is set.

Herizons: What is District Six?

Rozena Maart: District Six was classified as the sixth municipal district of Cape Town in 1867. It was a community of indigenous people, Khoi San, intermarried with peoples brought from Malaysia, India, Java and St. Helena--people who were made slaves by the Dutch during the 1700s and 1800s. Almost a quarter of a million people were removed from this region between 1968 and 1980.

Rosa's District Six is a collection of five connected stories centering around Rosa, an eight-year-old girl. We follow her adventures in the neighbourhood--from the first story, where Rosa hides in the house of her neighbour only to discover the untold libidinal pleasures of two women; to a woman who decides that a chair should continue to have its place in her house and fights to get it back after her daughters take it to be repaired; to a young woman whose mental state allows her mother to take ownership of her life, prohibiting her from intimacy with her childhood sweetheart; to a young mother whose husband is a political prisoner on Robben Island. Sexuality, spirituality, murder, death, madness and ancestral secrets are all in the stories.

What motivated you to write Rosa's District Six?

Rozena Maart: My family, along with several thousands of others, was forcibly removed from District Six on August 4, 1973. I got big, red, bumpy hives every single year after on August 4. I wrote it because my history had written itself inside of my body, without my consent, and I had no way of dealing with it in my home. When I was ready to talk about it, there was no one to share the story with because no one around me in Toronto knew anything about District Six. I wrote the first story because I felt trapped by memories that had never left my body. I needed to write it as a way of situating myself in the world.

What writing projects are you working on now?

Rozena Maart: I am working on The War Necklace, a story about Black men (African, Indian and Coloured) who were coerced and encouraged to fight in the Second World War on the side of the British when South Africa was still a British colony. They were led to believe that they would be contributing to their own liberation from apartheid at the time.

My grandmother's brother fought in the Second World War and told us many stories when we were growing up. The compensation for these men was a bicycle. Can you imagine--a bicycle! White men were given land and houses!

My uncle also gave me a necklace when I was 15, which he brought from Egypt, and the narrative in the novel is woven through this particular necklace and the other necklace, which is tire burnings, or 'necklacing,' as it was called in South Africa during the 1970s and the 1980s. These are killings of traitors or presumed traitors, where a car tire is placed over their neck and set alight. It sounds violent and brutal, but it was a reality we lived under.

I am also in the process of completing The Writing Circle, a novel set in present-day Cape Town that centres around five women who are part of a writing circle. One of the women is hijacked and raped in her car while the remaining four are in her house with the writing circle in progress, awaiting her late arrival.

When I was in South Africa, women would just come up to me and ask me about rape and sexual assault; there was no chance for me to feel or see myself as simply living elsewhere and being South African only in terms of history, ancestry and place of birth. Women engaged me, asked me questions about my work, about when I was going to write about the present situation of violence against women--in ways which Canadians never demand.

In South Africa, you are born within a social and political setting--this is your history--and therefore a social and political responsibility, and people ask you, they demand that you have something to say. You are never left off the hook, and there is no way that they would allow me to see myself as an outsider, or just as someone visiting my family.

What is the status of District Six today?

Rozena Maart: The new South African government was inaugurated in 1994, and within three years residents who were removed had taken the government to court and won the right to move back to the land. Many people have moved back to the former District Six, and there are still families awaiting their turn.

As well as being a novelist, you are also a teacher and an intellectual. Part of your work involves the development of theories that address White consciousness and Black consciousness. Can you talk about your work in this area?

Rozena Maart: I was raised and politicized within the Black-consciousness movement of Azania spearheaded by Steven Biko. Biko's speeches and writings tackled the need for Black consciousness to address the dialectical relationship we found ourselves in. It left us, as teenagers, with one thing on our minds: the decolonization of the mind--which Biko situated within the larger project of Black consciousness. It was the mind that was important, and the history of how that mind was formed, socialized, politicized, and the relationship between mind and flesh, mind and mind, mind and politics.

Of course, over the years, as a student, then as a graduate student, my work intensified, and the study of political philosophy urged greater interrogation of a history of writings about consciousness that failed to situate itself as White consciousness. The analysis and conceptual framework I employ departs with this knowledge of Black consciousness vis a vis Biko and Biko's reliance upon Franz Fanon (an intellectual and revolutionary before him) who wrote about the history of French colonialism and, in particular, Algeria.

When Fanon says, on the first page of his book Black Skin White Masks (1967), that "only a psychoanalytical interpretation of the black problem can lay bare the anomalies of affect that are responsible for the complex black-white relations," I grappled with those words and understood them within the larger complex of Black consciousness and Negritude from how Fanon's work as a psychiatrist and revolutionary emerged. Fanon also grappled with Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, and I followed these traces and studied what they offered. I began to employ psychoanalysis in the broader sense, in the sense Freud defined it, as the exchange of words, and also as his interest in the mind, in consciousness and the unconsciousness, and the mechanisms of the unconscious such as repression, disavowal and negation. I also explored the later developments of Lacan, which are focused on language and the relationship that consciousness and the unconscious has to language.

You ask the question about the importance of this work, and I can only say that the history of Black consciousness allows me to depart with a language which points to, and dismantles, the very language utilized to keep White domination, and hence White consciousness, in its place. Biko used a language which destabilized and undermined the very silent, unspoken operation of White domination. The larger purpose of my work is to make White consciousness visible through Black consciousness.

In his 1968 essay "White Mythology," Jacques Derrida situates and names "the White man" and what the White man does in the name of metaphysics and mythology. In it, he wrote: "Metaphysics, the white mythology which reassembles and reflects the culture of the West: the white man takes his own mythology, Indo-European mythology, his own logos, that is, the mythos of his idiom, for the universal form of that he must still wish to call Reason. White Mythology and metaphysics has erased within itself the fabulous scene that has produced it, the scene that nevertheless remains active and stirring, inscribed in white ink...."

White Consciousness, then, is examined in terms of speech, the imagination and writing. I am not just interested in acts of racism--writing about them, telling others about them and relaying them--but in how ideas, thoughts, consciousness and the mind are formed as part of the development of White consciousness, which gives rise to White politics in a broader sense.

White folks seem to have a particular fetish with studying racism--in other words, the effects of their unnamed racism on the oppressed and exploited masses--but fail to focus on the recipients of racism, the beneficiaries of colonialism, imperialism and racism--in other words, them.

Why have you chosen 'White consciousness' as a theoretical concept to mobilize, rather than the more commonly used term 'whiteness'?

Rozena Maart: Whiteness as a term became popular in late 1988 to 1989, firstly by Richard Dyer in England, who wrote on whiteness within the context of film and as a source of representational power. He was critiquing the presence of whiteness on screen and what it suggests for the broader issues/politics on identity and representation. This was later taken up by cultural critics like David Roediger, Ruth Frankenberg and Vron Ware.

Yet, nowhere in the works of these White writers is there any mention made of White domination, nor the perpetuation of social practices which secure whiteness--some of which they reproduce themselves by not examining their own agency. There is also no consideration on how to dismantle White dominance.

So, where I am coming from, if one does not practise self-examination and self-interrogation, how can one write or do research on something which is so woven into one's identity, one's flesh, and not situate yourself?

I see the writings on 'whiteness' merely as anthropological, in the sense that White folks study the behaviour of other white folks without situating or identifying the systemic, structural and institutional components of the operation, functioning and perpetuation of White domination, which is founded and rests very securely on the ideological base: White supremacy.

It is very easy to place the ideological basis of White supremacy within the hands and actions of the KKK because they don't lie about their motivations. But whiteness as derivative of White domination, and its ideological base, White supremacy, is an expression white identity situated within the larger function of white domination and the relations of White domination.

White consciousness--as I employ it--examines the relationship between consciousness and politics; between consciousness of existence and consciousness of being; between consciousness of mind, of ideas, of thought, and the relationship to the flesh--to agency, and the ability to carry out thoughts and ideas.

I found the above interview here...

I came across her words when I needed them...

Reading her I understood exactly what it was I was supposed to be doing, had to do. Although I've encountered other influences, her words still move me to write and now to blog...READ THE REST +/-

A LITANY FOR SURVIVAL
For those of us who live at the shoreline
standing upon the constant edges of decision
crucial and alone
for those of us who cannot indulge
the passing dreams of choice
who love in doorways coming and going
in the hours between dawns
looking inward and outward
at once before and after
seeking a now that can breed
futures
like bread in our children's mouths
so their dreams will not reflect
the death of ours:

For those of us
who were imprinted with fear
like a faint line in the center of our foreheads
learning to be afraid with our mother's milk
for by this weapon
this illusion of some safety to be found
the heavy-footed hoped to silence us
For all of us
this instant and this triumph
We were never meant to survive.

And when the sun rises we are afraid
it might not remain
when the sun sets we are afraid
it might not rise in the morning
when our stomachs are full we are afraid
of indigestion
when our stomachs are empty we are afraid
we may never eat again
when we are loved we are afraid
love will vanish
when we are alone we are afraid
love will never return
and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid

So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive

- Audre Lorde, The Black Unicorn

So it is better to blog out loud and take no prisoners...
Remembering
I was never meant to survive.

Okay...
I'm back.
Now down to business...

My Parties - Dire Straits

well this is my back yard - my back gate
I hate to start my parties late
here's the party cart - ain't that great?
that ain't the best part baby - just wait
that a genuine weather vane - it moves with the breeze
portable hammock baby - who needs trees
it's casual entertaining - we aim to please
at my parties

check out the shingles - it's brand new
excuse me while I mingle - hi, how are you
hey everybody - let me give you a toast
this one's for me - the host with the most

it's getting a trifle colder - step inside my home
that's a brass toilet tissue holder with its own telephone
that's a musical doorbell - it don't ring, I ain't kiddin'
it plays america the beautiful and tie a yellow ribbon

boy, this punch is a trip - it's o.k. in my book
here, take a sip - maybe a little heavy on the fruit
ah, here comes the dip - you may kiss the cook
let me show you honey - it's easy - look
you take a fork and spike 'em - say, did you try these?
so glad you like 'em - the secret's in the cheese
it's casual entertaining - we aim to please
at my parties

now don't talk to me about the polar bear
don't talk to me about the ozone layer
ain't much of anything these days, even the air
they're running out of rhinos - what do I care?
let's hear it for the dolphin - let's hear it for the trees
ain't running out of nothing in my deep freeze
it's casual entertaining - we aim to please
at my parties

Unprecedented Moment

How lucky am I to have the first post following such an unprecedented moment in history? A moment that will, I am quite sure, be followed by another just as unparalleled, yet even sweeter occasion.

I'd have been lucky, as well, if Hillary Clinton had won the nomination, for it too would have been an extraordinary moment in our nation’s history. It is, in a great many respects, as incredible, and due our humble respect, that a woman came so near to the historic fortune now bestowed upon Barack Obama. Yes. We are all living in a rather astonishing time. An era that, to be quite honest with you, seemed like an unreachable dream. When one of these two amazing possibilities is within our grasp... I’d say we are rather fortunate to be witness.

Now I don’t want to get ahead of myself because there are many miles to go.
Much nastiness to overcome; hordes of dirty, low down, cutthroat operatives,
Henchmen (and women) that have long been planning for such a day.

O. Make no mistake about it. There are backdoor, underground, despicable factions that have been writing the battle plans for a moment such as this for many, many years.

Some of them meet in dank boardrooms, and swill fine wines,
And many of them make more money than all of us combined.
Others meet in rundown buildings and pass out pamphlets
And make unspeakable pledges. While others congregate yet
in churches and pass the plate and make off-color remarks, literally.
Some drink mint juleps and play croquet in the backyard
Of some ungodly and unseemly rich aunt and uncle.
A few of them buy extra sheets, white sheets and sew, knit and crochet.
And secretly wish they belonged to an elite line of Aryan tutelage,
And they would, you see,
Except they must maintain appearances
because "civil society" dictates that their business
Look down upon bigotry.

Fortunately for a great number of us, these people are a shrinking minority.
Don’t get me wrong, they're a vicious minority and they do mean business,
But, if I’m reading the numbers correctly in this primary season,
They are about to meet their match in the newly found voice of the majority.

People with a conscience, on both sides of the aisle; the faithful, the fired up, the willing, the angry, the despondent, the riveted, the hopeful, the hopeless, the fed up, the soulful, the ready, the able, the educated, the uneducated, the white, the black, the red, the brown, the devout, the religious, the atheist, the agnostic, the tired, the hungry, the poor, the victims, the democrats, the republicans, the independents, the greens, the socialists, the progressives, the liberals, the conservatives, the moderates, the normal Joes, the artists, the mechanics, the laborers, the unions, the dressmakers, the hair stylists, the actors, the janitors, the non-unions, the teachers, the cooks, the chefs, the doctors, the lawyers, the police, the fire fighters, the medics, the students, the dry cleaners, the carpenters, the brick layers, the scientists, the pastors, the clergy, the Jew, the Muslim, the athletes, the shoe shiners, the bus drivers, the waiters, night watchers, the daycare workers, the mothers, the fathers, the siblings, the uncles, the aunts, the nieces, the nephews, the grand children, the great-grandchildren, the cousins, the neighbors, the troops, the contractors, the landscapers, the real-estate agents, the buyers, the sellers, the psychologists, the pilots, the ditch diggers, the care takers, the nurses, the doctors, the dentists, the hygienists, the assistants, the directors, the camera operators, the fast food employees, the delivery drivers, the jobless, the Native Americans, the hyphenated-Americans, the majority of Americans!

The factions of devoutly closed-minded, ignorant, bigoted, backward, no-good, derelicts have met their last throe.

Let's make sure that we recognize this moment for what it is... A truly historic milestone that need be followed by an even greater one. We could use the dream.