“the force we needed to make sure our country didn’t become another South Africa.”
Come now. You can’t possibly believed there was any CHANCE of something like that happening. That is very negative on our country. Typically only liberals display such hyperbolic negativity about the US.
In fact, the civil-rights movement worked partly because more white people didn’t really care that much about whether they sat with a black person.
If the whole nation was really hateful of blacks (rather than just not thinking about it much), the Civil Rights Act and related would’ve caused major uproar by WHITES all over; maybe some rioting. The transition, if you will, would not have been at all smooth. Most people just let it slide because it just wasn’t that important to them to be separate from blacks. They’d even had too much influence by popular artists and the like alone to be really hateful.
The fact that Rosa Parks couldn’t sit anywhere on a bus where she felt proved that we were another South Africa. White-Black marriages were also verbotten.
If the USA, especially the South wasn’t another South Africa, then why the hell were people denied to marry who they wanted to marry and sit where they wanted to sit on the bus? The only thing that was different between South Africa and the Southern US was that hurricanes hit the deep south. Well, that and token voting rights that were fought against tooth and nail by the establishments in those towns.
At times, it wasn’t a regionalized issue either. A former police chief of Saint Paul, a town that’s hardly in the south, Bill Finney, an African American, and a Conservative, couldn’t even go to parts of his city growing up because of racial violence.
So please don’t tell me how racial tensions were easy in our country back then. If it wasn’t, again, why couldn’t white-black couples could marry.
If it wasn’t for MLK and his message of peaceful (Although collectivist and therefore somewhat flawed) protest, the USA would have either been:
A: Boycotted by other foreign countries due to human rights violations.
B: Invaded and “liberated” by foreign countries that were effing sick of the US’ treatment of blacks. When we liberate countries, we try to introduce libertarian philosophy in their countries constitutions. When other countries do it, they impose socialism. In case you didn’t know, socialism is evil.
C: Had a large section of the population of the US simply betray us during wartime, and thereby losing a war. (Which is what may have been a contributing force in the Vietnam loss)
And don’t take this as me siding with our enemies, but the reason why there was even an opportunity for our communist enemies to win against us during the cold war was because they played the segregationists like a fiddle and cleaved the blacks and the whites in the country apart like a hot knife through butter. A people united cannot be defeated. The USA was not united, and ergo, could have been easily defeated.
If it wasn’t for MLK’s peaceful, intergrationist message, we would have had a race war fueled by the Soviets. The Soviets were not about to leave a fracture in American society heal itself.
Re: Lincoln’s birthday. Lincoln’s birthday wasn’t eliminated with MLK day.
http://www.snopes.com/holidays/presidents/presidents.asp
Read it and weep. The first Presidents day was created in the 1960’s. The first MLK day wasn’t instituted until the 1980’s.
The left are many things, but time travelers, they are not.
>Take a look at today’s South Africa, a violent, horrific nation dominated by a Marxist gang of thugs known as the ANC and maybe you’ll see some irony in your statement.
The reason why SA is so violent isn’t because the blacks have freedom. Other black-dominated nations have gained independence without too much violence. Jamaica and the Caymans are perfect examples. SA’s violent because the government had the wrong idea after it became integrated, which was to attack the former oppressors rather than the attitude of working with the former oppressors to make sure the country didn’t become poor. Integration didn’t fail the South Africans, collectivism did.
>This is the Clinton tactic. Tear down other people from American history to build someone else up. None of us are perfect, but to the best of my knowledge none of the above people supported the enemy in wartime.
Ummm... Keller was a communist. Commies hate the USA. Didn’t you get the memo?
>Nor is anyone suggesting that there should be a national holiday named after them. Nor that we should set aside a portion of each year to reflect on how perfect and deserving of worship they are.
Actually, there’s a Helen Keller day. It’s not as widely known because schools are out of session during her birthday but if schools were in session during her birthday, yes, you would probably get Keller worship.
The reason is that despite her being a leftist lunatic, overcoming blind-muteness is a great achievement. Some things are more important than politics.
>It took a fight to get an airport named after Ronald Reagan. And he never sided with the enemy or mistreated women. And Reagan brought down the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Empire. And only he could have done that. King was just a charismatic guy who got in front of the TV cameras faster than his associates, such as Abernathy. Yet, imagine the firestorm of opposition if someone suggested that we should have a Ronald Reagan day and a huge monument to Reagan in Washington.
And both men were great men. One destroyed an evil threatening to destroy the country from the outside and one destroyed an evil from destroying the country from the inside. They both made sure all Americans would be free, just in different ways.
But still, why not cherrypick other leaders foibles? You know, the great Abraham Lincoln. And another question, WTF does Ronald Reagan have to do with MLK Day?