The Fierce Urgency of Prophetic Hope

  ©Wendell Griffen, 2022     After Russian President Vladimir Putin directed Russian military forces to attack Ukraine, US President Joe Biden condemned the Russian attack as an act of “premeditated war.” Biden’s condemnation seems hollow when one recalls the history of "premeditated" US support for aggression and violence. Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arberry, Daunte Wright, Philando Castille, Alton Sterling, Rekia Boyd, and many other Black people were slaughtered by government agents in the United States. No US president – including former president Barack Obama – condemned that systemic pattern of “premeditated war.” The United States invaded Iraq on March 3, 2003. For the next nine (9) years, over a million US military personnel occupied that nation. More than 4500 US military personnel were killed. More than 100,000 Iraqi civilians were killed. The war in Iraq was “premeditated.” The United States invaded Vietnam to support French colonizer...

  ©Wendell Griffen, 2022     On Monday (February 14), Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson announced that he wants Arkansas legislators to appropriate up to $100 million to build another prison that can house 498 people. Divide $100 million by 498. The number you will see on your calculator is $200,803.21. That is how much Hutchinson wants Arkansans to spend to build more cages to house people. According to an online report issued by the Prison Policy Initiative, Arkansas has an incarceration rate of  942 per 100,000 people  (including prisons, jails, immigration detention, and juvenile justice facilities), meaning that it locks up a higher percentage of its people than any democracy on earth ( https://www.prisonpolicy.org/profiles/AR.html ). When people opposed to his plan shouted “No more cages” from the gallery of the Arkansas House Chamber during his speech to legislators, Governor Hutchinson said, “ Let me emphasize that this need for a new facility...

  ©Wendell Griffen, 2022   Perhaps you have read that Dr. Jim Ross wrote an opinion column published by the Arkansas Times that supports a proposal by the Little Rock School District to close four elementary schools.   If not, here is a link to his column. https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2022/02/09/in-support-of-lrsds-school-closure-plan-even-though-it-hurts I agree with Ross that the plan to close Baseline, Booker, Meadowcliff, and Western Hill Elementary Schools “hurts.”   I disagree with his premise that the LRSD must impose that hurt.   I also reject the idea that it is fair to do so. Closing schools where children from low and modest wealth Black and Latinx families live and have been historically dis-served most and longest is an unfair way to address declining student enrollment in those areas, charter schools, and LRSD budgetary concerns. Closing those schools is merely a convenient bureaucratic way to shift the “pain” of addressing racial i...

  REJECT  "RULE OF LAW" HYPOCRISY - DEMAND REPARATORY JUSTICE ©Wendell Griffen, 2022     On January 8, 2022, the Mail & Guardian (whose masthead asserts that it is “Africa’s Best Read” newspaper) published an opinion column by Lindiwe Sisulu titled “Whose law is it anyway” that has sparked a deep conversation in South Africa ( https://mg.co.za/opinion/2022-01-08-lindiwe-sisulu-whose-law-is-it-anyway/ ).   I learned of it from my friend Allan Boesak during one of our weekly conversations about faith and justice. After I read her piece, I shared it with other justice-minded public theologians in the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference with this statement: “This is a must read!” Lindiwe Sisulu’s parents, Walter and Albertina Sisulu, were leading figures with Nelson Mandela in the African National Congress (ANC) movement that resisted the racist apartheid regime of South Africa. Their daughter’s opinion column shows that she inherited her parents’ zeal fo...

  THESE PEOPLE INVITED MIKE HUCKABEE TO “RE-ASSASSINATE” DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. ON HIS HOLIDAY ©Wendell Griffen, 2022   The Arkansas Martin Luther King Jr. Commission, an agency within the Arkansas Department of Education, invited Mike Huckabee to deliver a “keynote address” during an invitation only “interfaith prayer breakfast” that will be hosted at the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion by Governor Asa Hutchinson at an undisclosed time on Monday, January 17, 2022, the federal holiday established to honor King’s life and ministry. I have called the Huckabee invitation another example of how people, including political and religious figures, are “re-assassinating” Martin Luther King Jr.   Mike Huckabee served as governor of Arkansas from 1996 to 2007. He came in second (behind former Senator John McCain) in the 2008 campaign for the Republican Party nomination for President of the United States and was unable to win the nomination in 2016. He is host of the Hucka...

  THE RE-ASSASSINATION OF MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. ©Wendell Griffen, 2022   This year, the Arkansas Martin Luther King Jr. Commission, an agency of the Arkansas Department of Education, has invited an un-reconstructed Southern Baptist preacher, right wing politician, and Fox News pundit named Mike Huckabee to deliver a "keynote address" during what it terms an "inter-faith prayer breakfast" on the King holiday (January 17). Attendance will be by invitation only. The event will be held at the Arkansas Governor's Mansion ( https://arkingdream.org/events) .  A year to the day before he was assassinated Martin Luther King Jr., a Baptist pastor, publicly defined the war in Vietnam as a civil rights issue on April 4, 1967, in an address titled Beyond Vietnam:   A Time to Break Silence to a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned about Vietnam at Riverside Church in New York City.   In doing so, King uttered the following prescient statement.   The war in Vi...