From Detroit Michigan:
“He wound into a conclusion by talking about how his son, an environmental geologist, told him about how, if he ever got lost, Barber should climb to the highest ground he could find because, above a certain altitude, snakes cannot survive.
‘They call this The Snake Line,’ Barber said. ‘We have got to get America back above The Snake Line.’”
~ Charlie Pierce
“… if you want to be inspired to build a fusion movement that takes our political discussion above the snake line to the moral high ground, I suggest you find the time [to watch this video]. Lordy…this man is just what our spirits need these days!”
~ Smartypants
Link to transcript below the fold.
Transcript from TrueBlueMajority: “I’m glad I didn’t miss it”.
The Rev. Dr. William Barber II
Opening evening keynote address to Netroots Nation
July 17, 2014
Selected quotes (all bolding is mine):
I want to talk today about a moral movement for a moral crisis is the only way to higher ground.
Down in NC we in the Forward Together movement believe that we are in a moral crisis that is trying to take America down the road to political deconstruction.
But there is a path to higher ground. There is a better way.
To grasp why many of us believe we are in a moral crisis, we need to glance into history for a moment to find an interpretive lens.
We need to understand like this conference, the roots and the networkings of immoral deconstruction. And the only way to do that we must find ourselves for a moment all the way back to the movement against slavery, and the movement that was designed to deal with the vestiges of slavery.
[In response to the new North Carolina constitution, a] group arose that called themselves the redemption movement and it was rooted in the extreme philosophy of immoral deconstruction and they fought back. They were moved by fear. Fear that their world was being taken over. Fear of a more just society. Fear of a more perfect union. They were radical racists and they began a process of immoral deconstruction. They began a campaign of fear and divide.
They called themselves heretically the redemption movement. Sounds nice but what they meant by that was it’s time for us to redeem America from the problem of black and white people working together for justice.
And from this history my friends we must understand the root of what we are seeing. We’ve learned, we learn that the strategy to stop any effort at reconstruction, the strategy to stop fusion movement has always consisted of these five or six direct attacks: you attack voting rights, you attack tax revenue and government programs and agencies designed to promote social uplift, you attack labor rights, you attack public education policy, you attack, uh, and you attack, or assassinate, or try to undermine white and black progressive leaders.
[Then we get the second reconstruction ] in 1954 we get the Brown decision. Just about a year later, August 28, 1955, you get the death of Emmett Till. Both of these things result in the kind of creation of a second reconstruction. A new fusion, moral fusion politics.
And what do we see with this new fusion of blacks, and now whites, and now women, and now Latinos, and now the LGBT community like Bayard Rustin and others, all coming together. What did we see?
We saw affirmative action, we saw the committee on equal employment, we saw civil rights connected morally to economic justice, we saw the Social Security amendments of 1965, we saw the creation on a moral basis of Medicare and Medicaid, we saw changes in the application of Social Security that allowed the domestic community and the agrarian community that had been left out in 1935 we saw the Civil Rights Act of ’64 and the Voting Rights Act of ’65 and President Johnson said on August 6, 1965 that the Voting Rights Act was a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that’s ever been won on any battlefield.
But then, as in the 1800s, the transformative power of moral based fusion politics once again came under attack.
This time the attacks were defined and developed by Kevin Phillips, a Nixon and Republican strategist, that came to be known as the White Southern Strategy. It was a strategy deliberately designed to play the race card in a way to drive Southern whites to vote for — vote their fears and not their future. […]
The target of the southern strategy was all of the southern states of the old confederacy. But also some of the suburbs of the north.
It was the goal of developing a solid south to ensure that the majority of Southern whites would resist and repeal any fusion political and moral alliances with African Americans and others.
Programs that were once popular became the focus of great dislike and were castigated as negative entitlements helping “those” undeserving people.
So when we look at the ebbs and the flows and the lessons and the vision of these two periods, the first reconstruction and the second reconstruction some of us believe that the current struggle before us now is a sign of the time that we are in the middle of the struggle for a third reconstruction in this nation. [applause]
That is why we see the same attacks we saw in the first reconstruction and the second reconstruction:
the attack on voting rights
the attack on fair tax policy
the attack on public education
the attack on labor rights
the attack on women
the attack on LGBT rights
the attack on immigrants’ rights
the attacks are a sign that we have the possibility of a third reconstruction if we don’t give up and understand what is at stake. [cheering and applause]
In NC before [Barack Obama] ever ran we had a movement, the Forward Together movement, that had already changed voting laws before he was on the ballot. That had won same day registration and early voting and Sunday voting. We challenged even Democrats, and we won.
And because of that we opened up the possibility for a broad new electorate. And when president Obama won the state and won some southern states, that new electorate revealed the potential of a new fusion majority, one that directly challenges the white southern strategy and that scares the daylights of those who want to stay stuck in the past.
But watch what happened. In both the first and the second reconstruction it took the extremists more than a decade to mount an effective reaction. With Obama’s election and the electorate, the extremists said no! Not just to him but even before the man was inaugurated they were saying no to the possibility of this new fusion politics.
So now we have a political extremist immoral deconstruction effort called by whatever name you want to call it: tea party, Koch money puppets, whatever you want to call it, it’s an immoral agenda of deconstruction. [cheering and applause]
This kind of agenda can’t just be challenged however with a mere left right debate or a conservative vs liberal debate. That’s, that language is too puny. And I would humbly submit, not even just calling for a populist movement, because populist movements especially in the south have not always been on the side of progressivism.
And in this moment how do we think about building a moral movement? We must first start with a vision. What Walter Brueggemann calls a prophetic moral vision that seeks to penetrate the despair. So that we can believe in and embrace new futures.
This kind of vision does not ask at first if the vision can be implemented. Because questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can first be imagined.
Where there is no vision, the people perish.
You see my brothers and sisters, another lesson for, from history. The slaves didn’t get out of slavery by first figuring out how to get out. They got out by first knowing they needed to get out. […]
And it’s time for progressives, and liberals if you call that yourself, whatever you call yourself, to stop walking around in despair. It’s time to fight back, and stand up! [extended applause and cheering]
If we’re going, if we’re going to have a real moral movement that can challenge the efforts at deconstruction in this country we have to reinstate imagination that is not driven not by pundits but by a larger vision.
Whether you believe in Jesus eternally you oughta at least believe in him historically because Jesus’s first sermon said to preach good news to the poor and the word there is PTOCHOS (πτωχός) it’s a greek word, which means preach good news to those who have been made poor by the social structures that create their poverty in the first place and give them the courage to stand up against it.
Our deepest, our deepest moral traditions declare that the true challenge to society is not private charity but public policy that impacts how people exist every day of their lives [applause]
We need a recovery of moral dissent.
The kind of moral dissent that Henry David Thoreau said… had. When someone asked him one day during slavery would he repent of his actions of going to jail and challenging the thing and Henry David Thoreau said the only thing I am going to repent of is my good behavior in the face of such injustice. And then I am going to ask myself what demons possessed me to be so quiet when so much wrong was going on. […]
We need the kind of language that’s not left or right or conservative or liberal, but moral, fusion language that says look: it’s extreme and immoral to suppress the right to vote. it’s extreme and immoral to deny medicaid for millions of poor people.
So our job, we must reclaim the moral center and shift the center of political gravity. Because in policy and politics in America, we face two choices. One is the low road to political destruction, and the other is the pathway to higher ground.
And so my friends in this kairos moment in history, right now right here, we’ve been called together to fight against the dangerous agenda of extremism. […]
We need to stop looking for a messiah candidate and build a movement, we need a deeper language that gets into people’s souls and pulls them into a new place.
Labor rights are not left or right issue. Women’s rights are not left or right issues. Education is not a left or right issue. Helping people when they are unemployed is not left or right. Those issues are the moral center of who we are and it’s high time that we recover the moral dialogue in this nation. [applause]
Not only that, we progressives need a movement where our relationship with our coalition partners are transformative not transactional.
You know we sometimes like those movements where everybody signs that I’m with the movement but they are really with those… their issue. But what we’ve got to have is a movement, and we’ve learned this in North Carolina, that understands the connectivity between the issues, where each partner yes embraces your issue, but you also embrace the other issues because you understand the intersectionality.
Let me make it plain for you.
The reality is, the greatest myth of our time is that extremist policies only hurt a small subset of people such as people of color, or women, or poor, or the LGBT community, when in fact they hurt us all.
Let me tell you the agenda that has pulled us together in NC.
One. Securing prolabor antipoverty policies that ensure economic sustainability.
Two. Educational equality by ensuring every child receives a high quality well-funded constitutionally diverse public education and access to colleges and community colleges.
Number three. Health care for all, by insuring access to the affordable care act, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, and providing environmental protection for all communities
Number four: fairness in the criminal justice system by addressing the continuing inequalities in the system, and providing equal protection under the law for black, brown and poor white people
Number five: protecting and expanding voting rights, women’s rights, LGBT rights, immigrants’ rights, and the fundamental principle of equal protection under the law.
if we can’t organize around that agenda then I’m wondering what’s wrong with us.[…]
… they can deride us, they can deflect from the issue, but they can’t debate us. They can’t debate us when we make our case on moral and constitutional grounds. […]
Oh they’re mad with us. Cause how do you cut 500,000 people’s Medicaid for instance and then declare it’s the moral thing to do. It doesn’t work! So all you can do is deride us.
When we started [7 years ago], most of the issues we supported were not above 50 percent, but now after shifting the consciousness and engaging a moral narrative with a faith, 55% of North Carolinians oppose refusing US aid for the long term jobless and the unemployed.
55% of North Carolinians now support raising the minimum wage.
58% of North Carolinians now say we should accept federal funds to expand Medicaid
61% of North Carolinians now oppose using public funds for vouchers to support private schools
54% of North Carolinians now would rather raise taxes and give teachers a pay raise than to cut taxes
55% of voters in North Carolina oppose the general assembly’s plan to cut personal and corporate taxes
66% of North Carolinians now don’t agree with the NC legislators’ strict limits on women’s reproductive rights
only now only 33% agree with cutting pre-K and child care aid
77 not 23% not even 1 in 4 agree with repealing the Racial Justice Act.
73 percent now favor outlawing discrimination against gays in hiring and firing
and 68% of voters now oppose cutting early voting and ending straight ticket voting and 68% favor an alternative to voter ID.
So my friends, those of us who believe in freedom, we’re being called now. Rise, raise up a fresh moral movement. I know I’ve taken a little time but these are not easy issues.
The day is over for quick political platitudes. The day is over for little campaign slogans. We’ve got to build a movement. We’ve got to think deeper. It’s going to take more than a few texts, and a few emails. We must engage in action that shifts the center of political gravity in this nation. And we’ve got to do it state by state. And we’ve got to say no matter who’s in Congress or who’s in the general assemblies of our state or who’s in the governor’s mansion, or who’s in the White House, we are demanding higher ground. And we’ve got to say you don’t have enough political power to vote us away, you don’t have enough insults to talk us away, and to the Koch brothers, you don’t have enough damn money to buy us away. [applause and cheering]
My son is an environmental physicist, and every now and then he tells me things about nature. And he told me one day, he said Daddy, if you ever get lost in mountainous territory and you have to walk out, don’t walk out through the valley, but climb up the mountain, to higher ground.
I said why must I climb up the mountain to higher ground.
He said daddy snakes live in the lowland. But if you go up the mountain there’s something in biology and environmental studies called a snake line. Snakes can’t live above it. Because they asphyxiate. They suffocate. They’re cold blooded animals and they die.
Well, in America we’ve got to get our politics above the snake line.
There are some snakes out here. There are some low-down policies out here. There’s some poison out here. Going backwards on voting rights, that’s below the snake line. Going backwards on civil rights, that’s below the snake line. Hurting people just because they have a different sexuality, that’s below the snake line. Stomping on poor people just because you’ve got power, that’s below the snake line. Denying health care to the sick and keeping children from opportunity, that’s below the snake line.[…]
But I stopped by to tell you, there’s got to be somebody that’s willing to go to higher ground, higher ground, where every child is educated; higher ground, where the sick receive health care; higher ground, where the poor are lifted; higher ground, where voting rights are secured…Neighbor, we’ve got to take America above the snake line…America is better than this. It’s time to go above the snake line…
When I go up in the spirit and I listen to the Lord sometimes…I heard the Lord say…Tea Party may endure for a night, Koch brothers may endure for a night, oppression may endure for a night, but hang in there, make your way to higher ground…
~
The “snake line” is a long running theme for Rev. Barber. For those who can’t watch an hour-long video, here is a shorter one from the William Barber YouTube Channel, Dec. 14th, 2013:
~
UPDATE:
And for you history geeks (:::raises hand:::) here is more on the Third Reconstruction he talks about in the speech:
h/t DeniseVelez
~
