Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”
I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fan in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with an its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.
A Nobel Peace Prize for Pete Seeger.
There’s a Movement to give Pete Seeger the Nobel Peace Prize. Who better?
Three over coffee.
Three day weekend. But it is 4 degrees in the Windy City. That’s the high temperature today. They say that with a wind chill of minus 14, it only takes ten minutes for your skin to freeze. I’m not checking to see if that is true.
The coffee at Peets just seemed extra good on a below freezing January morning. Anne and I spent an extra long time reading the papers. Neither of us wanted to go back outside. And we keep checking the cell phone to see if the expected grandson has arrived.
Nope. Not yet.
Obama likes Reagan. Short memory?
Starbucks may be losing market share. But for testing companies? It’s boom time!
It’s Time For A Change reports:
The year before NCLB went into effect, Vu reports, states spent $423 million on standardized tests. During the 2007- 08 school year, that amount will increase to almost $1.1 billion. And the windfall largely goes to five (soon to be four) testing companies.
Checking the box scores.
JD remembers statistics. Baseball and test scores.
I liked to look at how long the games were, and if anyone did exceptionally well. I could spend an hour a day. My stepfather, I think, pointed out that if the pitcher was good, the game was more likely to go fast. I started looking for the relationship, started trying to predict which games would go less than 2 hours, based on the pitchers’ records. I wasn’t particularly good, nor was I bad. I had no idea of the limitations of the data I was given (ie, found in the paper), and didn’t really know how to improve, except by a rough guess and check.
