Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Dreams of drones

Martin Luther King, Jr. 50 years ago today delivered a public speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the Great March on Washington D.C. for Jobs and Freedom in support of John Fitzgerald Kennedy to over 250,000 civil rights supporters without civil disobedience, where he shared with them a story of how the one hundred years later, between the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 to the day, "the Negro still is not free." Departing and improving, he relates to all that "I have a dream" that envisions freedom and equality arising from a land of slavery and hatred, further celebrating the ability to stand up for freedom together, as we let freedom ring, thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

Now half a century later, that dreamed freedom, change and hope, which many seemed to be realize with the election and reelection of Barack Hussein Obama the Second, has now all but gone into the reality of an Obama administration that only today looks for congressional approval and authorization to strike Syria and has allegedly used government surveillance programs tapping into data on phone calls, electronic mails and instant messaging on social media in the past.

With the media now slowly reporting on the allegedly unprecedented covert use of drones to kill thousands in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. To hear accounts coming out of these various countries of women, children and other civilian drone casualties, those victims killed and maimed by signature drone strikes, who may not have been the actual targets of the original attacks, one wonders if liberty, independence, freedom, equality or even life can arise from this and other political administrations that say they value civil liberty and national security, but constantly abuse at home and abroad. Obama Biden make have got Osama Bin Laden, but he slowly turns King's land of the sweet dream, into a home of the drone zone.