George Rebane
This morning’s gathering at Washington’s Lincoln Memorial was something to behold. We had breakfast watching C-SPAN’s broadcast of the event that drew somewhere in the neighborhood of 400,000 people. The occasion was definitely in the style of a revival meeting with unabashed appeals and praises to God and Jesus Christ. Billed as an event to ‘Restore Honor’ in our country and pay respects to our military, its message appeared to resonate with those attending.
It was a peaceful crowd that applauded, cheered, sang, and prayed at the appropriate times as it was led by a number of dignitaries that included MLK’s niece, Dr Alveda King, and Sarah Palin. The occasion was about as non-political as you can get and still have several hundred thousand people of mostly one socio-political ideology gather iconically at the nation’s capitol. I think that Glenn Beck and team pulled it off in a fine fettle – I hope everyone left the place as clean as they did last time.
But what to me is most interesting of all, was Rev Al Sharpton’s counter-demonstration, and who all spoke there. That gathered crowd numbered in the several thousand, and they definitely made the occasion into a Democratic (aka leftwing) rally. Their prime point was that Beck and his masses were denigrating and co-opting MLK’s anniversary and message. The main counter to Beck’s ‘It’s time we take back our country’ was ‘Well, it’s our country too, and you can’t have it back.’ That’s about as elevated as the dialogue got.
Maybe the most remarkable part of Sharpton’s ‘Restoring the Dream’ repartee was delivered by Sec Education Arne Duncan who correctly called education “the civil rights issue of our generation.” The irony of Duncan’s call is that the blacks have been screwed, blued, and tattooed by the left-liberal education machine that, since the sixties, has put teachers’ unions first and minority students last (if they got to stand in line at all).
The folks gathered there to counter Beck had not a clue of what the Democrat supported unions and education policies from far-left academia have done, not only to three generations of their children, but to the country overall. I agree with Duncan, once the state makes education a government run monopoly, plunders the nation’s pocketbook, and then delivers mush and pap in the classrooms instead of workplace-relevant education, then we all have had our civil rights violated. And as always, that starts with and has greatest impact on the poor and ignorant segments of our minorities.
Unfortunately for us all, under the leadership of the Sharptons and Jacksons, that is not about to change any time soon.
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