The power

BBC News Magazine:

In 1996, a black teenager protected a white man from an angry mob who thought he supported the Ku Klux Klan. It was an act of extraordinary courage and kindness.



Keshia Thomas was 18 when the Ku Klux Klan, the white supremacist organisation, held a rally in her home town in Michigan. Full story here.
...
For Mark Brunner, a student photographer who witnessed the episode, it was who she saved that made Thomas' actions so remarkable. "She put herself at physical risk to protect someone who, in my opinion, would not have done the same for her," he says. "Who does that in this world?"
...
"I knew what it was like to be hurt," she says. "The many times that that happened, I wish someone would have stood up for me."
...

"That some in Ann Arbor have been heard grumbling that she should have left the man to his fate, only speaks of how far they have drifted from their own humanity. And of the crying need to get it back. Keshia's choice was to affirm what they have lost. Keshia's choice was human. Keshia's choice was hope." ~ Leonard Pitts, Jr. (The Miami Herald, June 29, 1996)

...and again:

"Hate begets hate; violence begets violence; toughness begets a greater toughness.
We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love." ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

"We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of course we are," Wendell Berry writes. "Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed? Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers? Why else would we all — by proxies we have given to greedy corporations and corrupt politicians — be participating in its destruction? Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us. How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing."

No farms no food

Lets call a Farmers' Holiday,

a Holiday let’s hold.

We’ll eat our wheat and ham and eggs,

And let them eat their gold.

Spaghetti inferno

What more can you say?

"I've made my political points. They haven't changed. They still don't change. They won't change. Once you've said brown shoes don't make it, and the people that pass your laws are all perverted, and all the rest of that stuff, what [else] have you gotta say?"

~ Frank Zappa