by Chris Hedges
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Truthdig
August 3, 2009
LeAlan Jones, the 30-year-old Green Party candidate for Barack Obama’s old Senate seat in Illinois, is as angry at injustice as he is at the African-American intellectual and political class that accommodates it. He does not buy Obama’s “post-racial” ideology or have much patience with African-American leaders who, hungry for prestige, power and money, have, in his eyes, forgotten the people they are supposed to represent. They have confused a personal ability to be heard and earn a comfortable living with justice.
“The selflessness of leaders like Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King, Harold Washington and Medgar Evers has produced selfishness within the elite African-American leadership,” Jones told me by phone from Chicago.
“This is the only thing I can do to have peace of mind,” he said when I asked him why he was running for office. “I am looking at a community that is suffering because of a lack of genuine concern from their leaders. This isn’t about a contract. This isn’t about a grant. This isn’t about who gets to stand behind the political elite at a press conference. This is about who is going to stand behind the people. What these leaders talk about and what needs to happen in the community is disjointed.”
[…]
via Truthdig
Copyright © 2009 Truthdig
Chris Hedges is the author of the new book “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.”
From the archives:
Book Excerpt: ‘Empire of Illusion’ by Chris Hedges
The Crooks Get Cash While the Poor Get Screwed by Chris Hedges
Dandelion Salad 
As black leaders, we not only had Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, but Stokeley Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, and the members of the Black Panther Party like Fred Hampton, who gave his life in Chicago for the struggle. Now we have a black President who gives trillions to Wall Street and continues imperialist wars and coups and tries desperately to maintain an aura of nobility. All the while the suffering in the ghetto continues while he has a beer with Dr. Henry Louis Gates.
The American Indian Party tried to assert their independence at Alcatraz and Wounded Knee and Leonard Peltier sits largely forgotten in jail for years and years.
Germany had a couple of weak Prime Ministers Franz von Papen and Kurt von Schleicher just before a strong man of the worst kind took power -Hitler. If Obama fails and the economy goes completely into depression, I doubt, knowing the American people, that we will get a socialist President, but one worse than George W. Bush.
These words are so true. It seems we live if a world of a “created reality” than the true reality that exists. This is a description of what exists!