Marvin Gaye’s “Inner City Blues (Makes Me Wanna Holler)”
One of the most beautiful songs ever written about the suffering and class complaints of the working class in America during the Vietnam War. My favorite picture in this montage is the protester holding the sign: “No Vietnamese Ever Called Me A Nigger.” That’s a profound statement.
As an American, living in the times I live now, we are certainly suffering these problems. With the Jeremiah Wright fiasco, I wonder whether we’re ever going to have real racial healing in this country.
Marvin Gaye’s brother fought in the Vietnam War. It greatly offended Marvin Gaye’s conscience that something like this could happen. Poor people, driven to absolute penury in the US, were conscripted to go fight Asian people they’d never even heard of, who were also destitute and poor because of the Chinese, French, Japanese, and American colonial oppression. If that doesn’t offend your conscience, I don’t know what will.
The Iraq War also offends me in nearly the same way. There is no conscription. The rich avoid service now. The poor go off and fight their wars for them. Wars for oil. Wars for empire. But no war to end the suffering of the poor here. No war to build hospitals or give us health care. Only wars to kill and maim. Only wars to steal from the treasury.
These things should offend your conscience, too. The richest country in the world can’t feed all its people or give them a half-way decent standard of living. This is a country that thinks of itself as a Christian nation but seems to ignore what the gospels about feeding the poor. This country thinks it’s a city on a hill, but it’s not. It’s a third world country with a lot more arms than it needs.
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The pity of this Presidential race in America is nobody has addressed the working class as a whole. Poverty binds people together more than colour divides them.
Forget MLK’s Black Consciousness, find a leader who will appeal to Poor Consciousness.
Though a pampered middle class liberal myself I’d guess being cold and hungry feels much the same whether one’s skin is black, white or somewhere between.
I, BTW am technically black, a quatroon, having one grandparent who was a native of India. Otherwise I’m English, I drink tea, eat fish and chips, support my local football - never soccer - team and like my bread toasted on both sides. And because I am well presented and in a high income bracket nobody comments on the slight touch of the tarbrush.
It’s time we got this whole race thing into perspective.