Well, yesterday was Blog for Choice Day, and I missed it. That in itself wouldn’t be so bad, but I just happened to write a flattering post about a pro-life Republican that day, so it hurts all the more.

I guess the millions of other pro-choice blogs out there covered the issue pretty well without me, and as always, The Onion makes the point as well as anyone. So I don’t really have much more to add to the conversation.

But one thing I’ve never understood is people who call themselves “pro-life” who support the death penalty. I mean, if we respect human life, doesn’t that mean all human lives, regardless of whether or not they share our respect for it? Isn’t respect for life more about how we act than it is about what they deserve?

Feel free to disagree, but then let’s knock off the “culture of life” rhetoric.

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice maintains a website of all of their executed offenders, including name, crime, and last statement. It’s a chilling collection, and is almost certain to reinforce whatever beliefs you already have about the death penalty.

Be sure to check out the Tracked in America website, posted by the ACLU, tracing how surveillance techniques have been used to monitor citizens and residents of the United States since World War I. 

It’s a good resource for educators and students, or anyone interested in American history, regardless of where you stand on the privacy issue.

On this day, we remember a visionary leader who fought against injustice and worked tirelessly for a better society.

But as we remember and honor the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s enormous contribution to the civil rights movement, let us also remember and honor what he stood for later in his life. FAIR published this article in 1995, explaining the migration of King’s focus, and the reluctance of the media to follow:

In the early 1960s, when King focused his challenge on legalized racial discrimination in the South, most major media were his allies. Network TV and national publications graphically showed the police dogs and bullwhips and cattle prods used against Southern blacks who sought the right to vote or to eat at a public lunch counter.

But after passage of civil rights acts in 1964 and 1965, King began challenging the nation’s fundamental priorities. He maintained that civil rights laws were empty without “human rights” – including economic rights. For people too poor to eat at a restaurant or afford a decent home, King said, anti-discrimination laws were hollow.

Noting that a majority of Americans below the poverty line were white, King developed a class perspective. He decried the huge income gaps between rich and poor, and called for “radical changes in the structure of our society” to redistribute wealth and power.

“True compassion,” King declared, “is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

You should really read the whole thing. The article goes on to talk about King’s opposition to the Vietnam War, which has chilling resonance today, in a way that it wouldn’t have in 1995. But the article returns to King’s efforts to fight poverty:

In his last months, King was organizing the most militant project of his life: the Poor People’s Campaign. He crisscrossed the country to assemble “a multiracial army of the poor” that would descend on Washington – engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol, if need be – until Congress enacted a poor people’s bill of rights. Reader’s Digest warned of an “insurrection.”

King’s economic bill of rights called for massive government jobs programs to rebuild America’s cities. He saw a crying need to confront a Congress that had demonstrated its “hostility to the poor” – appropriating “military funds with alacrity and generosity,” but providing “poverty funds with miserliness.”

You can see his increasing focus on economic justice in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. After discussing the evil of racial injustice, King moves on to note that, “A second evil which plagues the modern world is that of poverty.” His rhetorical eloquence doesn’t lend itself well to excerpt, but his conclusion cuts right to the point:

So it is obvious that if man is to redeem his spiritual and moral “lag”, he must go all out to bridge the social and economic gulf between the “haves” and the “have nots” of the world. Poverty is one of the most urgent items on the agenda of modern life.

Perhaps, if King had lived, he might have helped us bridge that gulf. Perhaps those special qualities he had within him that helped him win those essential victories in the struggle for civil rights might have helped him solve that puzzle we have yet to crack even today. Hurricane Katrina briefly blew the curtains back, and revealed the shameful truth on a national stage. But the winds have died down now, and the audience has lost interest and turned away.

So on this day, let’s remember King for who he was, and for what he believed in. For what he did, and for what he might have done. For the dream that he helped move toward reality, and for the nightmare from which he tried to awaken us.

Every year, the Edge Foundation poses a question to some of the world’s top minds. This year, the question was: “What are you optimistic about?” See what leading thinkers had to say and feel free to add your own thoughts in the comments section below.

I’ll go first. I am optimistic about the long-term potential that the Internet has in breaking down all kinds of barriers, but particularly those of class. For a very long time now, all mass media has come from wealth and power, and people just accepted that because there had never been any other way. But the Internet makes possible the creation of networks between people, and the construction of meaning from a variety of perspectives. Even in the infancy of the World Wide Web, we’ve seen such user-driven communication tools as message boards, peer-to-peer file sharing, weblogging, podcasting, video posting, and social networking websites. As the current generation of technology-savvy children become the developers and thinkers of the adult world, society itself will be reshaped in the image of this most democratic medium.

I’m not filing this under Predictions. As I said, I’m particularly optimistic about this one.

What are you optimistic about?

Remember Keith Ellison, the Minnesota Democrat who was elected to the House of Representatives in 2006? As the first Muslim elected to Congress, he naturally wanted to be sworn in on the Quran. This caused an uproar among such champions of liberty as Dennis Prager and Representative Virgil Goode (R-VA) who felt that people of all religions should be sworn in on the Christian Bible.

Well, the story flared up for a bit and then seemed to fade away. But when the time came, Ellison ended up being sworn in on a Quran that had been owned by Thomas Jefferson:

“It demonstrates that from the very beginning of our country, we had people who were visionary, who were religiously tolerant, who believed that knowledge and wisdom could be gleamed from any number of sources, including the Quran,” Ellison said in a telephone interview Wednesday.

“A visionary like Thomas Jefferson was not afraid of a different belief system,” Ellison said. “This just shows that religious tolerance is the bedrock of our country, and religious differences are nothing to be afraid of.”

At work, we’re preparing to roll out our new unit on Civil Rights, and I’ve been catching up on all of those things I should have learned in school but, for whatever reason, didn’t. Today, I learned something new about Emmett Till.

What I knew was that Emmett Till was a fourteen-year-old African American child who was brutally murdered for the crime of whistling at a white woman in Mississippi in 1955. The two killers were acquitted by an all-white jury who either thought the killing was justified, or just couldn’t be bothered to care that it wasn’t.

What I learned today was that the two killers later gave a full confession to Look magazine, which published their account of the killing. The article is being used as a part of our Civil Rights unit, and is available on the PBS website.

I’m not going to quote from it; you really have to read the whole thing. Then, you have to click on the link at the top that says “Letters to the Editor” and read those, because they are even more chilling than the article, in terms of understanding what the times were like.

The cumulative effect of studying myriad injustices across several different civil rights movements in such a short period of time has been sobering. But the most staggering element of all of it is just how recently most of this happened. When you look at all of the injustices in the world today, it’s easy to forget how much progress we’ve actually made. So, it’s been both depressing and inspiring at the same time. I’m curious to see how the kids will take to it all.

By the way, the PBS website is the best website on the entire Internet. Just thought you’d like to know. For more on this story, you can visit their Emmett Till page. If you’re an educator, you’ll want to set aside a weekend to explore their Teacher Source. They also have a page for kids. And there’s much, much more worth checking out, whatever your particular interests may be.