I'm listening to Ludacris' latest album, who by the way is a genius. Anyway, I was listening to his new song on the radio the other day when a commercial came on the radio for Weston Kia, a local car dealer here in the Portland area. The commercial had a man imitating Barrack Obama and was using Barracks "Yes we can" speech to sell cars. "My friends at Weston Kia say yes we can to low prices." I almost threw up, and then I got pissed.
You don't get to use a message of hope and inspiration for a country that desperately needs the change that President Obama represents to sell cars, or anything. The Yes We Can speech was one of the most powerful speeches since "I Have a Dream," by Dr Martin Luther King, or "The Ballot or the Bullet," by Malcolm X, or even JFK's inauguration speech. It was a speech that moved even those of us so jaded by 8 years of incompetent leadership that we saw a ray of hope. It was a speech that moved me to tears. I replay it whenever I need inspiration.
Yes We Can was originally used by Caesar Chavez in his fight for the rights of migrant farm workers. Barrack used it in the exact way it was meant to be used. People like the ones at Weston Kia use it as selling tool, because they want to cheapen Barracks message. They are the same people who are terrified by the change that Barrack represents. They are so used to being in charge of everything by the benefit of their money, status, and in most cases their whiteness that they can't see a possibility of everyone else getting ahead unless it some how takes away from them. Barrack actually addressed this in one of his speeches. In social justice we refer to it as zero sum thinking, but Barrack summarized it well by saying, "My dreams don't have to come at the cost of yours."
So I guess it's on Weston Kia. You and everyone else who's going to resist change. Tim Wise said it best when he said that he didn't want to work with right. He wants to demoralize and destroy them. When the Anne Coulter's, Rush Limbaugh's, James Dobson's, and Sean Hannities of the world are so demoralized that they give up and shut the hell up for good then we will be in a good place.
Change is coming, and you can either lead the change, follow along, or get the hell out the way. We have no use for the business that isn't interested in doing things a different way. I am interested in seeing you all go bankrupt, and being destroyed for being stupid enough to stand in the way of the revolution that your greed and old school way of doing things started.
Saturday, December 27, 2008
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