Which came first, the chicken or the minister?

“America’s chickens coming home to roost.” To hear the pundits talk, you’d think nobody ever heard of chickens before. To speak truth to power is the hardest challenge. The less powerful you are, the greater the challenge. But sometimes the truth doesn’t need a mouthpiece. It just is.

Last week, the fifth anniversary of the modern war in Iraq was commemorated by the 4,000th American military death since our occupation of that country in 2003. Without FOX News or CNN to tell us, it would still be true.

What does the Vice President say to the assertion by Martha Raddatz of ABC News that two thirds of the American people are against the war? “So?”

The arrogance of his reply is boosted by the power he employs. Bush’s War? Why don’t we call it what it is? Cheney’s War. A war not only on the people of Iraq—that, it seems, is parenthetical to the purpose—but on the balance of power in the world and on universal tenets of justice.

Edward Peck, the former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq and the deputy director of Ronald Reagan’s Terrorism Task Force (shouldn’t that have been Anti-Terrorism Task Force?) said that terrorism was “America’s chickens coming home to roost.” Whether Peck knew it or not, he was quoting Malcolm X, who was censured by Elijah Mohammed for saying the same thing about America’s social turmoil in the ‘60s. And, in 2001 Reverend Jeremiah Wright was quoting Edward Peck. He was not quoting Peck accidentally. He was quoting him by attribution. You can hear the full sermon Wright gave on CNN’s website.

“So?”

Wright also called the terrorism on 9/11 an “unbelievable tragedy” and “an unthinkable act” that caused him to “examine his personal relationship with God.” Funny, you don’t hear those sound bites on the evening news, do you?

Reverend Wright said he thought that 9/11 would “cause us to change the way we have been doing things,” and that if we continued to be an “arrogant, military, racist superpower,” the world had people willing to die to challenge us, even if they did not have the military resources to fight us conventionally. I remember thinking the same thing, moments after seeing the first plane explode the World Trade Center.

He suggested we put our resources behind a “war on racism, injustice and greed” as well as on global health care challenges like AIDS.

This, remember, was before Bush/Cheney declared war on Iraq. Before the first soldier of 4,000 had died.

Reverend Wright, in my opinion, was speaking truth to power.

There are those who will say, as Henry Clay did in 1848, “If you don’t like this country—leave.” Clay was speaking of the recently emancipated American Negro who wanted justice in the form of a vote.

It was Frederick Douglass who retorted, “we have decided to stay.”

Those of us who have protested this war and others like it have also decided to stay. To stay and protest and try to speak truth to power.

As Frederick Douglass said, “There is no progress without struggle. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder…”

“Power,” he said “concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

“So?”

- Cass Collins