Emmett Till, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, Viola Liuzzo, Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, and others who organized, marched, and sacrificed their time and their lives forced Johnson to pick up his pen and sign the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The brave didn�t wake up everyday saying, �I�m waiting on Johnson.�

Rev. Martin Luther King, residing in the rat-infested tenement apartment on Chicago�s Westside understood that when he paid out the 92 dollars for a month for rent. I�m sure he recognized that the neighbors surrounding his apartment hanging sheets and items of clothing hanging from ropes on back porches despite the inhuman filth were not waiting on Johnson.

The newly uniformed young Black man wasn�t waiting on Johnson. The latter had come to the young man, plenty of young Black men, and pointing to the East, stamped �property of the U.S.� on their foreheads.

King understood the setup, the big picture. Kennedy and then Johnson and Black people were still dying in the streets in the U.S. and in the villages of Vietnam.

What change?

King woke up one morning and said, Johnson who? Democrats

War is �an enemy,� King said, of the poor and those who fight in U.S. wars are poor and disproportionately Black. In �solidarity� Americans watch as �Negro and white boys on TV screens�kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same school (�Beyond Vietnam,� speech 1967). And the nation asks why Blacks are so violent. Why the uprising in the urban cities? King turns to the young men and women and when he talks about nonviolence, he is asked by these young people, �What about Vietnam� Dr. King? �I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.�

�Now it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America�s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read �Vietnam.��

A revolution of values, MLK, should look �uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.� It should see people �capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money� to fight war in foreign lands with no concern for the social betterment� of these lands and say - �This is not just.� Militarism is not just. Imperialism is not just. Racism is not just.

Capitalism�s facilitation of war to garner profits and resources, to manage the proliferation of racism, and to expand its domain on the planet is not just.

�Something is wrong with capitalism� (�The Other America,� speech 1967).

Wealth moves from the bottom to the top and accumulates in the hands of 1% of the population. Billions of dollars fueled the Vietnam War then, but trillions now manage wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Gaza, yes, were the U.S. Empire�s colonies, funneled money and military weaponry to engage in oppressive tactics against �determined enemies� kill, directly or indirectly, children!

From King�s Johnson to our Obama, the Empire has continued to spend more money on wars and the expansion of wars than its spent on the education of its children.

To the American people, King proposed a �move toward a democratic socialism� (Frogmore, S.C, speech 1966) as a response to the facilitators, be they democrat or republican of Empire, and their inability to correct the course of a government invested in violence.

There�s no waiting on Commander-in-Chief for this move!

King would point our attention to Afghanistan, to the �more than 850 Afghan children,� dying from �treatable diseases like diarrhea and pneumonia.� Quoting the March 3, 2010 Save the Children Report, Kathy Kelly, in her article �Pacified� writes that �a quarter of all children born� in Afghanistan �die before the age of five, while nearly 60 percent of children are malnourished and suffer physical or mental problems.�

We must stop now...I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of American who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and dealt death and corruption in Vietnam. (�Beyond Vietnam�)

In Afghanistan, on December 26, 2009, while many Americans celebrated Christmas and the victory of Barack Obama�s election, 8 children, asleep in their homes, awakened in terror when the door to their abode was kicked in. It�s dark, and the children, ages 11-18, hear strange sounds, language not their own. Pushed and poked to stand side by side, the children are handcuffed. Then, according to Kelly, the children are gunned down, �execution-style.�

It all happened so quickly. Seven school boys and one shepherd boy dead, Kelly reports, by a U.S-led forces, whether soldiers or mercenaries.

A bomb factory, a bomb factory, cried the U.S. military, to the surprise of the boys� neighbors. Reporter Jerome Starkey, Kelly writes, appealed to the UN to pursue the truth, and, on February 24, 2010, the U.S. �issued an apology, attesting to the boys� innocence.�

But alas, these children are DEAD!

Kelly�s �short list of atrocities� is available for anyone to read, if they want to know the truth about the change Gen. Stanley McChrystal brings to the war in Afghanistan. �[I]t isn�t very difficult,� Kelly writes, to pacify the American public. �We�re easily distracted from the war, and when we do note that an atrocity has happened, we seem more likely to respond with a shrug of dismay than a sustained protest.�

Others of us are just too distracted by the Commander-in-Chief. Some of us are so �in love� with the Commander-in-Chief�s power that we don�t see the war and the dead bodies of children, except to make a cursory comment here or there to appear PC on the Left.

Air Force One and the leather bomber jacket is a turn on.

�There�s going to be setbacks. We face a determined enemy. But we also know this: The United States of America does not quit once it starts on something.�

All eyes and ears at attention! What a jacket! Presidential!

What is it that King said? The greatest purveyor of violence is his own government! And now that government has a new Commander-in-Chief.

Norman Solomon is right to note the �candidly macabre� scene last week, on March 28, 2010, in Afghanistan: Yet, another U.S. president wearing the bomber jacket, standing in the midst of thousands of American troops (�A Bomber Jacket Doesn�t Cover the Blood�) who, back home, �gives the orders� to press the buttons that fire the missiles and drops the warheads in foreign lands.

This observation from Solomon is worth repeating: it�s the man in the bomber jacket assuring the troops that the U.S. will be there when they return home. If you come home and happen to suffer from PTSD, don�t worry: The U.S. is working to improve �care for our wounded warriors, especially those with PTSD and traumatic brain injuries.�

�We�re moving forward with the post-9/11 GI Bill so you and your families can pursue your dreams.�

I�d say this was a Bush-like moment - but one that is not at all funny!

As Solomon writes, �the government will help veterans with PTSD and traumatic brain injuries to pursue their dreams.� Words, words, words (to echo Hamlet) do produce the macabre, indeed!

The proposed U.S. defense budget, according to Kathy Kelly, �will cost the U.S. public two billion dollars per day.� The Commander-in-Chief �is seeking a 33 billion dollar supplemental to fund wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.�

Unlike Rev. Martin Luther King, the man photographed in the bomber jacket, wants to stay the course of violence.

And who is winning in these wars? Certainly, it�s not the poor and working class American nor the mothers and children in Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan who aren�t winning a thing - except more suffering and death.

Who are the �determined enemies� the U.S. Empire plans to destroy? Certainly, it�s not the bankers on Wall Street or the corporations protected by the Empire who are making a fortune from suffering and death.

War is the enemy of the poor everywhere. But do you think the latest president in the bomber jacket is thinking about the poor or those ancestors who died for peace?

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has been a writer for over thirty years of commentary, resistance criticism and cultural theory, and short stories with a Marxist sensibility to the impact of cultural narrative violence and its antithesis, resistance narratives. With entrenched dedication to justice and equality, she has served as a coordinator of student and community resistance projects that encourage the Black Feminist idea of an equalitarian community and facilitator of student-teacher communities behind the walls of academia for the last twenty years. Dr. Daniels holds a PhD in Modern American Literatures, with a specialty in Cultural Theory (race, gender, class narratives) from Loyola University, Chicago. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.