�.[C]onvictions are very often particular and immediate in form, and may not be consciously formulated by their holders at all, yet when we do find our convictions, we find the best clue to ourselves. Convictions may be distinguished from opinions: people stake money on opinions, whether of lawyers or of handicappers, but they have been known to stake their lives on their convictions; opinions are argued, but convictions are the hidden agenda in every argument, the unseen weight on even the most honest set of moral scales.

-James McClendon, Biographies as Theology

The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised,

will not be televised, will not be televised.

The revolution will be no re-run brothers;

The revolution will be live.

-Gil Scott-Heron, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised"

The lights have faded for those waking to the darkness of reality. Vulnerable to the lies and illusions, today seems a new day in their eyes. But it is only one more day in the marrow of old traditions.

If convictions were once among their prized possessions, they have awaken to discover that in that blinding light, they had fallen, yesterday or two years ago, or forty-five years ago, but they had fallen.

The liberal middle class in the U.S. knows a thing or two about convictions: consistently falling before power Mondays through Fridays and purchasing the road to the American Dream on Saturdays and Sundays. Even the KKK usually stays consistent in their convictions. If you are Black, walking or riding along a dark road in some areas of the U.S. and a few people announce they are KKK, you can be sure you are in trouble. Little Miss Riding Hood discovered she could not afford to mistake a wolf for her grandmother, no mater how much she desired to see her grandmother, on the road to deliver baskets of treats to her grandmother. Some delusions can be deadly.

Convictions too! But some convictions are worth dying for�

A few years back, in Chicago, my hometown, the Daley Machine and Barrack Obama arranged a marriage of convictions and many poor Blacks on the Southside were dumped from the future president's voting district long before president Obama dumped the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. The future president clearly stated he could wage a "better" war in Afghanistan. Anti-war, no! So when he escalated the war in Afghanistan, continued business as usual in Iraq from inside the world's largest embassy, increased drone attacks in Pakistan, the Ella Bakers and Malcolm Xs outside the White House should have organized a protest, denouncing what King would certainly have denounced, against the Ella Baker and Malcolm X inside the White House.

Strange that Ella and Malcolm do not seem to worry about the 2.2 million mostly Black and Brown incarcerated in U.S. prisons. Even stranger still that Ella and Malcolm would think Arne Duncan is a man with the best intentions when it comes to educating Black children.

But that is the problem with the darkness of reality: it is littered with individuals invested in the free market and war profits, and as Malcolm would say, too many with the belief that they arrived on the Mayflower or they escaped the potato famine or the decadence of Europe and only a small fraction of their being was ever an enslaved African.

What 'kind of mood,' what 'moral arrangements' would cause us, in whatever society we live, with whatever 'fundamental decency' we possess, to either perpetrate (as bombardiers, or atomic scientists, or political leaders), or to just accept (as obedient citizens), the burning of children in vast numbers[?], historian Howard Zinn asked (The Bomb).

We have lost warriors to the mental and physical pipelines of power and the mechanism of capitalism. A few have come back to say they are sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

What would it be like if we had warriors who loved, like el Hajj Malik el Shabazz or Dr. Martin L. King or Ella Baker or Diane Nash? What would this love look like?

Over fifty years ago, the Icelandic writer Halldor Laxness offered a debate about love and justice. His protagonist, the pauper poet Olafur Karason, "a little unsure of himself," declares that love is that feeling we have for others. The older man, Orn Ulfar, disagrees: "I don't believe in love," he says, "I don't even know what love is."

But there is one human characteristic "that equals the most commendable qualities of animals, one mark of nobility above the gods," and it is that human can choose justice.

He who doesn't choose justice isn't human. I have little fondness for that pity which the coward calls love�What is love? If a loving person sees someone's eye being gouged out, he howls as if his own eye were being gouged out. On the other hand, he isn't moved at all if he sees powerful liars utterly rob a whole people of their sight and thereby their good sense as well. If a loving man sees a dog's tail being trodden on, he suffers as if he himself had a tail; on the other hand, it doesn't touch any string in his heart if he looks upon demented criminals trampling half of mankind into the dirt.

Ulfar (Laxness) concludes:

It is justice, not love, that (sic) will one day give life to the children of the future�the battle for justice is the one thing which gives human life rational meaning.

Dr. Martin Luther King told us that love is not endemic poverty in the world's richest nation on an Earth with plenty for all of its inhabitants. Nor is love war. But Americans do not listen. Morally anemic, Americans embrace free market love. Americans work harder than any other people to fatten the fat corporate capitalists cats while their indifference manufactures products of war to spill blood in someone else's backyard.

If we belief, beyond our howls, as King did that "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere," ("Letter from A Birmingham Jail"), then our love would look like justice! .Love that is not an expression of justice is a drone missile, a raid to deport Haitian and Mexican workers, a prison cell for the politically aware, another 50 or 100 or 200 killed by tornados or a mine explosion. Love that is not an expression of justice is a death sentence for Earth and its inhabitants.

Whatever "liberal middle class" minds or "conservative" minds, believe, they believe, and the power of the corporate capitalists are on their side. Their agenda is no longer hidden. These are not the warriors we are waiting for, so why should we expect revolutionary change from them? Those who did not want a Malcolm or an Ella went to the polls and voted for Obama and McCann!

Warriors for justice know our convictions; they know of that human characteristic which "gives life rational meaning." As Langston knew, our convictions, like rivers, run "deep" and "ancient." Consistent. Revolutionary.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has a Doctorate in Modern American Literature/Cultural Theory. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.