Liberation Theology And History Are More Effective For Treating Depression Than Drugs

The past year was a year of sickness and death for my family and friends and, as I knew it would, the aftereffects have been debilitating.   I've refused the prescription drugs that have been suggested, as if becoming addicted to a drug would help.  I have been treating what has been officially called chronic depression by my doctor by listening to liberation theologians and the such.   James Cone has done more for me than any pill could have done.   And I thank the greatest electronic journalist in the history of the medium,  Bill Moyers, for presenting so much of what I've been listening to.

Here is a great discussion between James Cone, Taylor Branch and Bill Moyers which shows how radical Martin Luther King jr. was, how far beyond the more officially designated radicals he was.

You can find the transcript here.

There are so many things in the discussion that could be mentioned, one which supports a point I made was that the self-promoted, officially more radical were already trying to push him aside due to the unfashionable status of his thinking.

  BILL MOYERS: But here's the unfortunate thing. As you write about it, after his assassination, riots broke out across Memphis. And even though he acknowledged that, quote, "Riot is the language of the unheard," didn't this outbreak of violence in some way begin the end of the movement?

TAYLOR BRANCH: This is a very, very profound and difficult topic and I would have to say that it had already begun before. Nonviolence was already not popular. It had already become passé. Some of the most hostile language toward nonviolence came from the Left, people saying that nonviolence is kind of Sunday school and outmoded now.

And that we want to adopt the language of violence.

And King's answer to that was, “Nonviolence is a leadership doctrine. If we abandon nonviolence, it's not that we're stepping up to demand the right to be just violent, just like first-class white people. We're stepping back from a leadership doctrine in the United States." And that's what America including especially white America, does not understand.

One of the few speeches, by the way, in which a white leader acknowledged that was Johnson.

Before he said, "We shall overcome," he said “so it was at Appomattox, so it was at Concord, so it was at Selma last week, when fate and destiny met in the same moment."

So, he was putting a nonviolent black movement not only in the heart of American patriotism, but in the vanguard heart of American patriotism.

BILL MOYERS: But do you admit that nonviolence ultimately didn't work? That it couldn't change America?

TAYLOR BRANCH: No.

JAMES CONE: No. It did change America.

TAYLOR BRANCH: It did change America.

JAMES CONE: It changed it radically for me. I grew up in Arkansas and I know what fear is. What the movement did, nonviolence did, was to take the terror out of the South. And for the first time, you can not only go to hotels, but you can go all over the South without much fear of harm. That is a major achievement.

BILL MOYERS: Certainly I recognize that.

TAYLOR BRANCH: The white South was the poorest region of the country when it was segregated. It was totally preoccupied in this terror.

It was not fit for professional sports, even, until nonviolence lifted it out of segregation and white Southern politicians were no longer stigmatized. So, you get Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton and all these people elected president. And they're all standing on the shoulders of a nonviolent black movement. Whether they realize it or acknowledge it or not. That's the reason that our blinkered memory of this period is such a handicap for us today.

But, you know, getting rid of poverty, redistribution of wealth is not as easy as getting the right to vote. The right to vote doesn't cost anything.

A big reason that what Reverend King tried to accomplish in his last years wasn't accomplished is that he took on the biggest issue, poverty, which struck at the heart of the problem,  poverty, the injustice of enormous wealth with power and the massive number of people in poverty without power.

BILL MOYERS: Not since Martin Luther King has inequality been on the table the way it was at the Occupy briefly appeared on the scene. And I wondered watching Occupy from here if a Martin Luther King had risen to embody that movement, would they have carried us further toward the changes that King and others wanted?

JAMES CONE: It may would have. I'm not sure. But, you know, getting rid of poverty, redistribution of wealth is not as easy as getting the right to vote. The right to vote doesn't cost anything. But redistribution of wealth takes across class lines. That costs a lot. And people will fight you in order to prevent that from happening. And I don't know what it would take in order to make that happen.

TAYLOR BRANCH: It's also not a simple formula. Dr. King never said we were going to give up freedom to have redistribution imposed on us. He never advocated something like that. It is a hard intellectual, spiritual challenge to figure out, "How do you preserve freedom and address poverty?" I don’t think Occupy got that far yet. It didn’t take that much responsibility.

It was just kind of a sign of protest and not a developed sense of responsibility the way, even the sit-ins were taking lessons from Rosa Parks.

JAMES CONE: Yes. That's right. The sit-ins disrupted society. The freedom riots disrupted things. Occupy Wall Street didn't disrupt much of anything. They just camped down there and they were not grassroots in quite the same way the Southern movement was during the time of King.

I think that is the key to something which has puzzled me over the past decade, the relative speed and ease with which substantial progress has been made in gay rights, that gay rights has been taken up by the media and corporations and affluent people while racial justice and, undeniably, poor people have been being pushed backwards.  Most of what gay people are fighting for doesn't basically challenge the economic structure of the developing oligarchy.   The oligarchs can allow progress for people who aren't demanding economic justice without it costing them anything.  Racial justice, women's equality, economic justice, environmental protection, those all cost them something, they cost the millionaires who run the media something.   And one of the most potent of means with which the struggles that The Reverend King was involved was suppressed was to make them seem unfashionable.

Beginning in the 60s with "radicals" who would turn conservative in rather telling numbers, who would sabotage the left by attaching it to violent, anti-democratic theories and figures and into the 1970s and 80s with the attacks on "political correctness" which made racism fashionable, the same people who sold Americans on tobacco, junk food, casual use of tranquilizers and stupid fashions, used their skills to destroy the most successful leftist movement in the history of the country, taking down the unions at the same time.

Every line of the discussion is worth reading and hearing and thinking about.  I'm going to take two of these a day until this time has passed and I intend to keep going.   I heard someone once say that if the statistical evidence of the enhancement of health and well being of being actively religious were put in a pill, the psychiatrists would be lobbying the FDA to approve it for immediate sale.  But we don't need them to prescribe it, we can take it over the counter now.  For free. And acting on it is even more effective.