Good Trouble
"Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble."
I hope you did not miss hearing a real president speak today.
Barack Obama gave the eulogy for John Lewis and it was - quite fittingly - a call to action.
You think you are fed up with the state of the world? Imagine being John Lewis, a Black man, walking around in the halls of power for more than three decades, after having spent longer than a decade being thrashed and beaten and jeered at in his home country because he was fighting for the rights he read about in history books and in the very Constitution he, and everybody else in government, swore an oath upon.
Imagine walking those halls of power realizing that no matter how old, no matter how wise, no matter how much experience you might accumulate, because you are Black, your best efforts at moving the ball down the field probably won’t be enough.
Barack Obama spoke about the Voting Rights Act. Renaming it the John Lewis Voting Rights Act of 2020. The original Voting Rights Act was signed into law in 1965. The 1965 Act was needed to strike down ‘Jim Crow’ laws in individual states that kept Black people from voting. President Obama alluded to this when he mentioned the requirement of “guessing how many beans were in a jar” before you could vote.
(I read that during Reconstruction in Mississippi 1865-1877 there were over 100,000 Black people registered to vote. Once the state was left to its own ‘devices’, that number shrunk to about 5,000.)
Here’s what happened with the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in 2013:
Seven years ago, the supreme court issued one of the most consequential rulings in a generation in a case called Shelby county v Holder. In a 5-4 vote, the court struck down a formula at the heart of the Voting Rights Act, the landmark 1965 law that required certain states and localities with a history of discrimination against minority voters to get changes cleared by the federal government before they went into effect.
It’s hard to overstate the significance of this decision. The power of the Voting Rights Act was in the design that the supreme court gutted – discriminatory voting policies could be blocked before they harmed voters. The law placed the burden of proof on government officials to prove why the changes they were seeking were not discriminatory. Now, voters who are discriminated against now bear the burden of proving they are disenfranchised.
As it stands right now, the (John Lewis) Voting Rights Act of 2020 passed out of the House of Representatives and languishes in the GOP-controlled Senate, even though, Republicans lavished praise on John Lewis for his good fight and advocacy for civil rights and for voting rights. In case you have not looked at who sits under the GOP’s tiny tent lately, I will spare you the effort and inform you that it is predominantly the usual suspects who have done everything in their power to make voting and life difficult for people who have no power.
Barack Obama also brought up the filibuster.
Today during his eulogy to John Lewis he referred to it as a “Jim Crow relic”. The filibuster has a long history in the Senate but it is little wonder President Obama has a bad taste in his mouth in regards to the practice. Strom Thurmond, an inveterate racist, one-time presidential candidate for the short-lived Dixiecrats and oldest senator to have served, set the record for ‘blowing smoke’ by speaking for 24 hours in an effort to defeat the Civil Rights bill. (For a point of reference: the Dixiecrats were to the Democrats what the Tea Party is to the Republicans. Ideological extremists.)
Specifically, he said, “If all this takes eliminating the filibuster, another Jim Crow relic, in order to secure the God-given rights of every American, then that’s what we should do.”
I do not doubt that the filibuster has been used like a bludgeon when it comes to holding power.
Barack Obama spoke to honor a man who dedicated most of his life to public service.
He used his time in the pulpit in a way that would have made John Lewis proud.
And, in the end, he called on us to honor John Lewis’ legacy by getting into ‘good trouble’.
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Missing baseball? Imagine if every batter had THIS guy’s routine! At 40 seconds into this clip the videographer closes in so you can better appreciate the antics. I really like that the catcher is unimpressed.
Also, Michelle Obama has her own podcast on Spotify! Guess who was booked as her first guest? I haven’t heard it yet. Please report in.
