The following is an excerpt from “The Revolution Now:  Update On Beloved Community”, an essay by June Jordan written in 1997 and delivered at a celebration of Martin Luther King’s life.  Necessary strength and faith during these overwhelming times, and still so relevant:

June Jordan

And you cannot achieve a stabilized mutually respectful, conscientious, neither dominant nor submissive, love, without a revolution of the spirit that invented and imposed and enforced iniquities of inequality in the first place.

Is there reason for hope?…

,,,I know there is.

It may be small.  It may be dim.  But there is a fire transfiguring the muted, the daunted spirit of people everywhere.  Like the “still small voice” that came to the prophet Elijah, this is not a spectacular, televised conflagration.  But the burning away of passivity and misplaced anger and self-loathing among the poor and the invisible and the inaudible and the insecure and the economically dispensable and the socially ostracized–that burning away persists like the undeniable light from the farthest stars.

I know that it is happening.

–from Affirmative Acts, pg. 207

If this doesn’t scare you, nothing will. Listen to what they are saying and especially listen to their answers to the interviewer’s questions. None of this is about health care, as Jimmy Carter said at a townhall at the Carter Center in Atlanta, it is about racism.

“There is an inherent feeling among many in this country that an African-American should not be president.”

The Georgia Democrat said the outburst was a part of a disturbing trend directed at the president that has included demonstrators equating Obama to Nazi leaders.

“Those kind of things are not just casual outcomes of a sincere debate on whether we should have a national program on health care,” he said. “It’s deeper than that.”

In an interview with NBC, Carter added,

“Racism … still exists and I think it has bubbled up to the surface because of a belief among many white people, not just in the south but around the country, that African-Americans are not qualified to lead this great country. It’s an abominable circumstance and grieves me and concerns me very deeply.”

As the hatred ratchets up on the streets of the U.S., it is dangerously clear that this is a concerted effort to promote irrational, racist hatred to the point where one of these people will take it upon themselves to take a shot at the President. There is a large gaping wound still festering in this country and the peril of ignoring it is all too clear.