The Evening Line: ‘Selma’ meets Charlie Hebdo

As I remarked yesterday, the marches in Paris, the huge crowds, were a unified response by modernity against a direct attack on the rights we’ve spent thousands of years taking for ourselves. We’ve taken them from the priests and imams, the kings and aristocrats, the landed,…the list goes on through history, as we’ve slowly taken them for ourselves. Rights for all of us, for each of us.

And those crowds were in the face of continued threats from fundamentalist reactionaries, threats to shoot, to bomb, to kill. Just like the millions of Americans, immediately after 9/11, that crowded into…oh, right, we didn’t do that. Not then.

We did it, at least in the thousands, back when we saw the rights of modernity being attacked by fundamentalist conservatives at the Edmund Pettus  Bridge outside Selma Alabama. Attacked with tear gas and ball bats, horses and truncheons. When Americans, white Americans, already secure in their right to vote, saw other Americans being beaten and gassed for trying to exercise their right to vote, to even register to vote, well, that was literally a bridge too far.

Whether a building is blown up, or a flag is burned, we can build another building, China will stitch us lots more flags. It hurts, it may even kill, but it doesn’t stop civilization’s forward march.

But try to end free speech, freedom of expression, freedom of religion, and a million people, of every age, ethnicity and religion, show up together to shout  ‘Je Suis Charlie’.

And try to keep people from voting, from choosing their government, from the right of self-determination, and America comes out and marches. Marches from Selma to Montgomery, marches on Washington, and marches to the ballot box.  It took a century, from the end of the Civil War, to the Civil Rights Act, 1865 to 1965, for America to be willing to enforce the rights of African-Americans.

Until 1965, it was the Democrats of the South that did the oppressing. It was liberals, in both the Republican and Democratic parties, that passed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts.

And ever since, it’s been the Republican Party, giving in to its fundamentalist reactionaries, in so many states, that has worked to roll these rights back, with ‘Show Me Your Papers’ laws for voter registration,  and the poll taxes, er, fees, for those credentials, without funding the infrastructure needed to issue those papers.

Might be better to start marching again…before someone is, again, beaten or killed for trying to vote.