That was Secretary of State Dean Rusk speaking, and oddly enough, the large nation was not the United States reorganizing Vietnam, but Russia reorganizing Czechoslovakia.
Four out of every five Americans are more affluent than any other people in history. They have reached that affluence by degrading the fifth person, the poor black Americans, brown Americans and white Americans who have neither the power nor the resources to complain about their lot.
Our welfare system taxes the poor more than our tax system taxes the rich. A poor man on welfare must pay the government 70 cents on every dollar he earns above $30 a month; a rich man pays the government only 25 cents on every dollar he wins on the stock market.
Half of the farmers in the United States—the half who have incomes of less than $2,500 a year—received 5% of the farm subsidies provided by the government; 10% of the farmers in the United States received 60% of the subsidies.
Some Americans of thirty years ago were afraid that we might become a welfare state. Instead, we have become a warfare state. Our nation gives 80% of its wealth to the Pentagon, and 10% to health, education, and welfare.
We have come gradually, I think, to this point in our history because of several factors. Over the years the United States has strengthened, rather than relinquished, its role as policemen of the world.
Over the years racism in the United States has remained, rather than weakened. And most importantly for us, over the years liberals and radicals have continued to argue rather than cooperate, to the detriment of both liberal, radical and reformist movements in the United States.
A good example of the divisiveness and the lack of stick-to-it-ness on the left can be found in the South. Those who began a student revolution there eight years ago—a revolution that spread to Berkeley and to Columbia—are no longer there.
Those who directed the movement from lunch counters to bus stations to voting booths to electoral politics are no longer there.
Those northerners whose concern and whose money helped finance that movement are no longer concerned or financial.
The government we once thought sympathetic to our goals is either no longer the government or is no longer sympathetic.
Instead, there are a few workers plodding the cotton fields of Mississippi and the bayous of Louisiana and the red hills of Georgia trying to organize a movement. Instead, there is scattered student concern at this school or that one, while the millions in the ghetto go uncared for, unheeded and unattended except by policemen and occasionally National Guardsmen.
Instead, a battle some thought was won at the lunch counter is being lost at the ballot box and in the county courthouse.
The battle for the integrated schoolroom seat is being lost, not by the devious legal action or oppressive night riders, but by the cotton picking machine, the runaway textile mill, the right-to-work laws which keep poor men poor, and make children go so hungry they cannot learn, and so naked they cannot attend school.
We are passing now through the annual American political season. The road shows are on tour. There are two main attractions, produced by two companies, but they speak from the same script.
The title of this year’s extravaganza is “Law and Action” or “How to Sell Out to the South Without Once Saying Nigger.”
One play is directed by Strom Thurmond, the other by Richard Daley. In one play Mr. Thurmond also acts to remind the hero of his lines; in the other, a prompter from Texas is always standing in the wings to remind the leading man if he forgets his part.
In some parts of the country there will be alternatives for both the left and the right, but the right is the winner in this year’s election because it has three candidates to choose from.
Those on the left can choose or, of course, make no choice at all. To do the latter will make one feel purer, of course, but to opt out altogether leaves something to be desired.
There is an obvious longing in America for change, and that longing is shared not just by blacks in the cities and students on the campus but by millions of housewives and farmers and laborers and others.
The job of the liberal and the job of the radical is to put those people and their longing together.
When Robert Kennedy announced his candidacy, some of us cringed. He’s ruthless, we said, or he was a bad attorney general, we said, or it’s a plot by President Johnson, we said.
But no one who saw black people in Watts scrambling for his hand or who saw white farmers in Alabama smiling at his jokes could believe that for long, and no one who saw the miles and miles of mourners from New York to Washington could remember old tales or harbor old grudges.
When Eugene McCarthy, months before Kennedy, announced his candidacy, we said it’s only a trick. We said he just wants to get us off the streets and into the system. We said he wants to kill the student movement.
But no one who saw the students in New Hampshire could believe that student movements are dead, and no one who saw the battle of the Conrad Hilton in Chicago can believe McCarthy got the students off the streets.
These two campaigns, for all their failures and their tragic losses, brought to America the fervor and the feeling that had not existed since the Freedom Rides of 1961; that had not existed since the sit-in demonstrations of 1960; that had not existed since the March on Washington in 1963.
These moments in history, representing no accomplishment but only people in motion, signified a beginning.
That beginning is best told in a poem by a woman named Margaret Rigg:
Face possible end of business as usual stop white silence in America stop kidding stop killing stop mace stop foam stop police arms race stop napalm stop bombing stop bloodletting stop Nixon stop sleeping stop dreaming stop crying stop mumbling stop now begin again begin beginning begin hearing begin seeing begin trying begin doing begin working begin working hard begin organizing begin being human begin living begin being possible begin facing the possible surprise of your own voice begin.
Beginning again reads nicely as a poem; for our lives it requires something more than reading nicely. It requires a realization that we have not overcome, that our enemies are not against the wall, and that tomorrow will not be a better day.
It requires constant attention to the problems of today, to racism, to hunger and to war.
It requires some form of unity among those who insist on a better day, rather than one hundred different drummers beating different tunes.
It requires that those least affected and least involved—the great mass of middle-class Americans, white and black—involve themselves.
It requires that action replace slogan, and it requires that rhetoric be replaced with reality.
It requires finally a commitment—the commitment that might have kept the South in ferment; the commitment that would have kept Chicago’s police force busy; a commitment that might have insured a choice and not an echo on the top of the ballot in November.
And it will require that each of us keep in mind a prophecy written by the late Langston Hughes—that dreams deferred do explode.
For if this dream is deferred much longer, then an explosion will come—and in the words of the old song, it will be like God giving Noah the rainbow sign; now more water, the fire next time.
Fighting Nixon
In this November 1969 speech—arguably the most militant speech he had given up to this point—Bond calls for the need to defeat the police state, build community socialism, and demand reparations to “the tune of $15 a nigger.”43
Now that America has had a change of leaders and the new set has had a chance to operate for some 22 months, one has had time to consider exactly what will be the attitude of the new faces in Washington toward tired old faces of the poor,