Welcome to tonight’s $27 group open thread!
Last night I posted several quotes, including a quote by Martin Luther King and a quote by Bernie about Martin Luther King, which I found inspiring and thought were worth sharing. I’ll be posting more quotes in tonight’s diary. But for the benefit of any of you who didn’t see those quotes last night (or had trouble making out what they said) here they are in somewhat easier-to-read form.
Here’s the Martin Luther King quote from last night’s diary:
"Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can't ride you unless your back is bent."
(Or at least that's the version of the quote which I saw posted numerous places online, including a Brandeis University page. But none of the sites with that version identify when or where King said this, so I think it may be a modified version of this passage from King’s April 1963 Letter From a Birmingham Jail in which he wrote:
“Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.”
And here’s something Bernie Sanders said about MLK:
He was working on a major project called "The Poor People's March." Not just for African-Americans, but for whites, for Hispanics, for Native Americans. And the point that he was making was that in a great country like the United States, we should not be spending huge amounts of money on the military, when we had children in America going hungry. We should not be having the kind of income and wealth inequality that we had, where so few had so much, and so many people had so little.
(That’s from a 5-minute video Sanders made in 2013 talking about King’s life and work ; I posted the video in last night’s diary, but if you don’t have time to listen to a 5-minute video you can read a complete transcript of what Sanders said directly below the video clip.)
I also included a classic Sanders quote in last night’s diary which wasn’t about Martin Luther King. The encoded version I posted was:
"Go also enid soidseheyn in imo pltut cnwd flkal-snnrn ulfnsihneul, gmoeh kndeizouun gnroel phopt ansd goso rlhropt. Imo pokhuhneo rlfndid ulfnsihnel rduin sorlheo al pokhuhneo wnsd imo gnrlel, mosl wlrhzt ilepn cmtuhkhleo in rlao, enid imo ynjoseroeil."
That translates to:
"We are not returning to the days of back-room abortions, when countless women died or were maimed. The decision about abortion must remain a decision for the woman, her family and physician to make, not the government."
For anyone who wasn’t able to decode that last night, I’ll demonstrate how to do that in the comments section (so as not to take up too much space in the diary and to leave more room for tonight’s quotes).
Okay, some new quotes coming up! (But first, perhaps you’d like a short musical interlude?)
x YouTube Video