Speaker 1: I'm Jesse Jackson Junior. Welcome forward to the Jesse Jackson
Junior Show on KBLA Talk fifteen eighty. It is thought
Provoking Thursdays. Ativa's show, historically on our Program on Wealthy Wednesdays,
has now moved to Thursday Afternoons, Thought Provoking Thursdays, Our
Conversations with Atiba. Ativa is the former deputy executive director
for the National Black Caucus of State Legislators NBCSL. He's
a Strategic Alliance consultant and president of Party Politics US.
He's worked as a TV political contributor for B and
C News, The Heat in the no with Mo, The
Leslie Marshall Show, at Heart Radio, Gov Exec ninety six
point three, w h u R, and the One America
News Network. He most recently was a guest host on
Rising in American Daily News and Opinion of web series
produced in Washington, D C. By the political newspaper The
Hill in nineteen. In twenty twenty, Atiba released his first novel,
Saving Grace, a political thriller. T But welcome forward to
the Jesse Jackson Junior Show.
Speaker 2: Jesse, Happy New Year, and it's great to be.
Speaker 1: Back, Tiba. I am so grateful that you're here. There
are number of subject matters that I like to cover today,
including but not limited to Minneapolis, Venezuela, and what's going
on generally in the world. But one of your consulting
specialties is collecting data to determine what the American people
want the president of the United States to work on.
Can you share a little bit more about that with us?
Speaker 2: Yeah? So, Jesus is hard to believe.
Speaker 3: It was eleven years ago a friend of mine came
up with this idea of why don't we take get
a chalkboard and let young people on a college campus
educate us about what it is that they wanted to
see the next president work on. And what we did
was home Depot built us a chalkboard which was four
hundred pounds. You learn a lot when you do these things,
but it was on wheels and then we willed it out.
And the whole idea of when I started like an
organization called Party Politics US, was about how do you
put the fund before the politics to attract people. So
Coca Cola donated refreshments and items, and someone else.
Speaker 2: Came out with.
Speaker 3: A drone and we had music, and we created this
party around the chalkboard at Texas State University. Within four days,
seven five hundred plus students had written on the board
what they wanted to see the next president work on.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 3: And what we learned from that was people just want
to be heard. And so we had, you know, different viewpoints.
You know, some people wanted to be able to conceal
and carry, some people wanted abortion rights. It was like,
whatever it was, it was there. And then some things
that ended up becoming repetitive. We just said to people,
just checked checked next to those items.
Speaker 2: And it was fascinating.
Speaker 3: That those students weren't just sharing what they wanted to
see the next president work on, but that they said
simply by being feeling like they were being heard that
they it made them want to vote. And from there
and we called it chalkboard conversations, and from there we
started doing that and then we started having different conversations.
We started doing like little group talks and then panels.
And then that took us to Drake University for the
Drake Debates. It took us to Morgan State University, It
took us to Virginia Statem. It just took us to
all these different places. But Ultimately, what it taught us
is that people regardless of age, because then older people
who saw that we were posting this were like, well
what about us? So we started a private group on
Facebook and people started talking and what the.
Speaker 2: Whole idea was, how can we do this and get people.
Speaker 3: From across party affiliation, religion, ethnicities, gender, etc. Together to
the conversations. And it was just became fascinating and that's
what we started doing. That's how we started collecting data.
Speaker 1: I think that's a fascinating story. I do have a
question though, eleven years later, can you imagine that what
the same students or different set of students students might
be writing on a similar on a similar board if
you had to wheel a four hundred pounds home depot
onto the onto the yard of Texas of Texas, Texas
Southern or Texas State.
Speaker 3: Texas State, you know that's where Lyndon Johnson's I want
to say library, but I know Lyndon Johnson School is there.
But well, first of all, we learned how to buy
small chalkboards and take pictures of people writing on those
talkboards a lot lighter and a lot easier to transport.
Imagine trying to get a four hundred pounds chalkboard from
Texas State University to Drake University in Iowa. It was
a chore and we believe it or not, there were
some some students from Texas State University that volunteered the
that did that and they took that trip.
Speaker 2: Today. Yes, I do think. You know, we live in
a very volatile, very sensitive.
Speaker 3: Nation where anyone who disagrees with us people automatically think
that they're against us. And I often use the phrase
to people that if you take a glass and put
it on a table and we're all sitting around the table,
we all came to the table from different places, but
we're all looking through the same glass, and as we
look through that glass, we're going to see something different.
In other words, we all come from different viewpoints, we
all come from different journeys, but we could be looking
at the same thing but see it have a different perspective.
And I think this overall, that's where we have what
that's what's going on in this country, is that we're
looking through the same glass.
Speaker 2: We're looking through the same country. We're all part of
the same country. We just have different perspectives because we've
had different journeys.
Speaker 1: Kind of feels like the Canterbury Tales. We're all trying
to get to the Archbishop, the monk, the friar, the
various characters in I think Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales kind
of gave some semblance of what we're going through as
a nation and certainly what TIVA experienced on Texas's campus.
I'm Jesse Jackson Junior listening to the Jesse Jackson Junior
Show on KBLA Talk fifteen eighty. It's thought provoking Thursdays.
Our conversations with the TIBA will continue when we come
forward on KBLA Talk fifteen eighty. Jackson eighty, Well, there
will be any conversation with the TIVA on a myriad
of issues, and one that is dominating the news as
we speak, tragic shooting and the loss of life in
the state of Minnesota of a young thirty seven year
old mother, young white woman who was exercising, by all
obvious and objective accounts, her First Amendment rights to talk
to law enforcement, shout at them, scream at them. They
were certainly being somewhat aggressive when he grabbed her car doors.
If he was going to snatch her out of her car.
Whatever that conversation was, that, clearly from my perspective, did
not lead to her being read her miranda rights, the
right to remain silent, the remind the right to counsel,
all of those things that you're issued when police officers
get ready to snatch you out of your car, which
is clearly what he was doing when he grabbed the
door handle. But the irony for me, Attiva is this,
And I'm not just talking about the fact that this
tragedy occurred just four blocks from where George Floyd was killed.
I'm talking about all of the incidences where an unarmed
African American man or woman were denied, their rights were
not read, their rights were unarmed, and trained law enforcement
officers shot them. Now, I make the distinction between trained
law enforcement officers who function at the municipal letter and
level and border patrol agents who work near the nation's
borders to secure them and their interaction with legal immigrants,
illegal immigrants, undocumented workers, the process that we never read
about in the paper. When some action between border patrol
and someone crossing the border goes awry, it doesn't make
the news. But given the behavior of how the American
people themselves are being treated by ice in our cities.
We can only imagine that that which we cannot see
when I is actually on the southern border, that some
crimes against humanity are taking place that the American people
have never heard about. You're getting your behind whoop by
ice in Minnesota or Chicago, or Los Angeles or wherever
else ice is. You better believe someone who has absolutely
no constitutional protection is taking it on the head. But
this event yesterday is particularly troubling because not only because
of the national attention, but it wasn't a young black
man or Breonna Taylor. It was white woman and an
agent shot her in her face, an unarmed woman. The
consequences of that a team but I think are just
as extraordinary as any event in the last thirty years
of civil rights and social justice TIBA.
Speaker 3: So many things come to mind with all that. Thank
you for that, Jesse. First off, my thoughts, my prayers,
my condolences to her family. M Ron grind And an
astronaut just spent one hundred and I think in seventy
eight days on the space station, and he talked about
living a lie. He talks about in an interview he
talks about seeing the earth from above and seeing lightning
hit in one place and how it reverberated across the
planet even though we don't see it. He talked about
how he could see not just the seven continents, but
see how all the continents and there then the people
all connected questioned and asked, are we doing and living
the right way by putting.
Speaker 2: Profit over the planet?
Speaker 1: Wow?
Speaker 3: I'm saying this because what we are seeing today, whether
or not it is in Russia or China or the
United States, is a reverberation of a few men who
are using the power that they believe that they have,
and that they're targeting people who are innocent in the
pursuit of profit. And over time we look at religion
and scripture and we say the word prophet. All of
these things that we are seeing happen today have been prophesied.
We have put our faith in our belief and other
things aside from the Creator. And until we come back
to recognizing that, then our humanity and our livelihood.
Speaker 2: And our lives are at stake.
Speaker 3: So you have people that believe that these men will
make their lives better. And again what I said before
the break perspective, people are coming to these things with
different perspectives, and we don't want to listen to how
and why they feel the way that they do because
there's so much there's stone at them that is creating
fear as opposed to offering hope.
Speaker 1: Let me ask this question to Tiva because my father
often tells this story of how I guess it's Robert F. Kennedy.
He went to an urban area and he held up
a little black child, and the nation's response when Bobby
Kennedy was running for president, I think in nineteen sixty eight,
was poor little black baby. Look at Bobby Kennedy holding
poor little black child. Then he went to Appalachia and
maybe even to deep rural South, and he held up
a kid of a similar age, but the kid was
poor and white, tighter, tattered clothing, hungry, ill kempt I
struggle with hygiene, absence of water and soap and basic
and living in a shotgun house. And America's response between
Bobby Kennedy holding up the little black child was one response, like,
all little black kids are in poverty, so we understand that.
But when they saw the little white kid in poverty,
the country responded with this idea of a fervor for
a war on poverty and to eliminate poverty. I'm thinking
in this moment that the death of this mother in Minneapolis,
and we've seen how we've been treated as young African Americans,
some of whom have died due to police behaviors. You know,
it's so used to young black men getting shot. Just
another brother got shot. Chicago has a crime problem. There's
just another look how violent Donald Trump says we are
in these various cities. But this is different. This is
a white woman who got shot exercising her constitutional rights.
And Christinoan the administration, the president, the vice president offer
an interpretation of events that the investigation itself has not
yet rendered. And I'm finding a level of hypocrisy and
irony and irony in that.
Speaker 3: Fatiba Muhammad Ali said the eyes that the hands can't
hit what the eyes can't see, and we've heard the
believe is Norm Chowski say that he who controls the
news controls the people. I'm constantly engaged in conversations with
my friends who work on the Hill and my friends
who are elected officials around the country about the need
to create a more simplified, concise message. Part of my
message is that this woman who died was more than white.
She was more than a woman, She was more than
a mother, She was.
Speaker 2: A human being.
Speaker 3: Yes, when I think about the movie, I can't remember
the name of it, but Samuel Jackson plays a father
who kills or shoots a man, kills a man because
he rapes his daughter a time to kill. And in
the movie, Matthew McConaughey, he's up against this Southern da
and when he in his closing arguments, he gives this
picture and tells the jury, now, imagine that this child,
that your child was in the situation, what's raped and whatever?
And he gives us gory picture and then they know
that it's him talking about Samuel Jackson. And he ends
it and he says, now, imagine she was white. We've
got I believe that there are a lot of reasons
for us to be fearful today. And I'm listening to
a book right now called Peaks and Valleys, and I
just finished reading it for the like maybe the fifth
or sixth time.
Speaker 2: Who moved my cheese? We're in a valley right now.
We want to get back to the peak.
Speaker 3: We want to be able to be on the top
with the moral high ground and the financial well being
and the religious believe in that. Okay, what we're doing
is right, But how do we get there with all
of these things that all keep pushing us down to
the valley. And I think that in order to get
back to the peak, we've got to figure out how
do we let go of the baggage. The baggage is
how we keep saying, well, they keep doing this to
us because of the color of our skin, because of
my gender, Because how do we figure out that all
of us, regardless of ethnicity or gender or nationality, are
all have the same enemy. We can't do that if
we keep carrying the baggage. The woman who was killed
you just said, was killed just blocks away from where
George Floyd was killed. And both of them were killed
by law enforcement. Both of them were killed by men
with a gun. America has a gun problem. America has
a violence problem. America has an issue. Yes, it is
deeply rooted in terms of ethnicity. That goes back to
I'm just going to use two thousand and eight to
twenty sixteen because I've been saying this on the show,
that they didn't attack President Obama just because he was
a skin color. They attacked him because he represented us,
because he offered hope. They don't want us to hope,
because when we hope, we can be free. That's what
they did to us when we were enslaved. And we're
still enslaved today because we're still living on the preceidice
of this idea that fear is grounding us and keeping
us from moving up the mountain that doctor King talked about.
We think about these things and these quotes and these
speeches that have been given, but there's a deeper meaning
that I too will get to the mountaintop.
Speaker 1: Let me try this, because I know we have just
two or three minutes before we come forward. And this
is a profound conversation for me. I still mourn the
loss of Charlie Kirk. Do I agree with anything he said? No?
Do I like his politics? Did I know? Do I
agree with his right wing spin on everything and matter
of fact, racist spin on me. Absolutely not. Do I
think that that man, at the end of the day
had the right to return home to his wife and
to his family. Absolutely I do, because at the end
of the day, we all get to go home. That's
American That was political violence, and it is unacceptable on
the left or on the right, when we do it
to each other, when we do it to others, it
is just plain wrong and it needs to stop. I
want to make the state the distinction, however, between political
violence and state violence. State violence, when law enforcement puts
their knee on the neck of a citizen, when law
enforcement shoots a woman protesting in the face, that's state violence.
That's different than political violence. That's state violence. When the
head of the Department of Homeland Security or the President
of the United States or the Vice president of the
United States make justifiable statements about an American citizen who's
married with kids and seeks to change the narrative to
justify why she was shot in the face, that's different
for me than pure political violence. That's state sponsored terror.
And it's going to happen again because the government itself
is justifying and is essentially told in numbers of speeches
where President Trump was running for office, he said, why
don't you put your cuffs on him and slam their
heads into the back of the car.
Speaker 4: Take the gloves off. He would say, go ahead and
hit him. They come up, they spit we hit back
or something. He said, that's state violence. For men and
women who serve the country honorably and historically have been
seen as public servants, whether they're border patrol agents, law
enforcement officers. We serve and protect the public. Never before have.
Speaker 1: The talking about weaponizing a vehicle. Never before have people
weaponized law enforcement towards and against the American people on
the scale that we're witnessing it. More conversations with a
Tiba on KBLA Talk fifteen to eighty. When we come
forward on KBLA it stopped provooking Thursdays with one of
our most thoughtful contributors. Atiba is our very special guest
in this hour. Atiba, welcome forward to the show.
Speaker 2: Hey, jesse A.
Speaker 1: Tiba, I I just want to call her name. Renee
Nicole Good lost her life at the hands of the
United States. An American citizen was shot in the face
by someone who swore to uphold the Constitution of the
United States and to serve the people of the United States.
They shot her in her face, and the justification before
the investigation has been completed, from the President of the
United States, the Vice President of the United States, and
the Secretary of Homeland Security have all but said they
reserve the right to shoot an American in the face
or protesting their presence in our cities. It's hard for
me to imagine that I'm even having this conversation ATIBA.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's hard to believe, but it's a conversation that
we need to have. It's a This is one of
those conversations you would expect the President to come out
and say something that was compassionate, something.
Speaker 2: That was that would be healing. But we're not going
to get that. I keep saying, no one's coming to
save us. This is up to us.
Speaker 3: This is up to us to figure out how do
we connect with our friends and fellow citizens in Middle America.
It is up to us to figure out how we
go to the rust Belt and to the South and
talk to people who don't necessarily agree with us, but
that have the same issues that we do.
Speaker 2: And part of those issues right.
Speaker 3: Now is and I keep asking my friends who are
running campaigns, and maybe it's something that I feel like
I keep sending, nobody's next some save us.
Speaker 2: Maybe it's sometimes to do myself to do a video.
Speaker 3: Of a family sitting at a computer looking at how
their healthcare costs are going up and ended just shortly
with it's a thirty second clip that says affordability as
a hoax. I'm jumping to this that I'm going to
come back to where we're.
Speaker 2: We're just talking about.
Speaker 3: Take your talk is what about the person who goes
into the grocery store and buys butter and eggs and milk,
and before they get to meat and vegetables, they've already
spent close to thirty dollars.
Speaker 2: Now, let's go back to why some of these folks.
Speaker 3: Joined and are wearing these masks and going out in
the streets. They were offered a great deal of money
even as signing bonus. We don't know what their situation is,
what led them to there. But how do we, like
I'm a Dallas Cowboy fan, figure out how to attract
someone else to my team. Usually is because I'm paying
I'm going to pay you more than than another team
is going to be or I think that the culture
there is going to be better.
Speaker 2: We have to figure out a way to show and
to re.
Speaker 3: Establish that the country's best interest is not to attack Venezuela.
The country's best interest is not to attack our own
citizens and the best in the country's best interests are
not to keep kicking out immigrants who are doing or
who are who are not violating or breaking any laws.
We've got to figure out how do we when we
see law enforcement doing what we saw happened in Minneapolis.
Speaker 2: And we know how the world came to our age
came to our to support us after George Floyd. But
we've got to go back to slavery and talk about
how this law enforcement culture and virus that is in
this country that plagues us, that is a cancer, started
with slavery. We've got to go back.
Speaker 3: And talk about how profit over the planet started with slavery.
We've got to go back and talk about how the
idea that poor white people being against black people was
started because there were a few people that have money
that told those poor people that I'm not the problem.
Speaker 2: The problem is that we have this free labor right here.
Speaker 3: We have to do a better job of not just
talking about the color of our skin, but to talk
about how this country has always put its knee on
the back, has always shot people in the face, has
mamed has killed, has kicked people out, and it is
all founded in this idea that this country was founded on,
which is a corrupt thing, which was enslavement, because we're
still living it out today. It's just that we're going
to our jobs every day and getting paid a little
bit and then getting taxed a lot, and not realizing
that we are the slaves of today.
Speaker 1: I can say this, and I really appreciate the depth
of this conversation and certainly the tone and spirit within
which you are engaging it. I just longed for the
moment where a woman can exercise her First Amendment rights.
She can shout at law enforcement and shout at law enforcement,
and a law enforcement officer or agent can come from
behind his mask and say, ma'am, I'm just doing my job. Ma'am, ma'am,
I'm just doing my job. But these stone faced, masked
bullies who've been authorized by Boveno, Christie Home and the
President of the United States to come to our cities
and well, just open up a cannawoop pass. You know,
I think it's beneath the dignity of the creed of
the nation. Give me you're tired, Give me your poor,
give me your huddle. Masses who yearn to breathe free,
come to these teeming shores where we essentially have a
place for which we can live free and express ourselves
in freedom at the Kennedy Center, in the clothes that
we wear, in the dresses that we wear, or pants
that we wear. If you like cross dressing, hey that's
on you. But in America it's not a problem because
in America you are free to be yourself. But at
some point in time on Tiva, decency is part of this, ma'am.
I'm just doing my job, I ma'am. I have a
job to do between now and five o'clock. I want
to go home too. And I remember when they sent
the agents to and the National Guard to Los Angeles,
and I said, hey, take every take all of them
a cup of coffee. They're there on orders, They're just
there to do their job and make them feel comfortable.
In that space. Something has broken down in terms of
the civility between even men who have orders to punish us.
There is still a way to handle the moment, in
the moment, in the now that can If they won't deescalate,
we can deescalate. I believe that there's this thing called
being human, as you stated, Atiba, and being decent.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's being is about being human. We're not being
human and we've lost class. I remember two thousand and
two being in France and talking to people and practicing
my French because I used to speak fluently, and the
conversation being that, Tiva, your country is like the Simpsons. Well,
Europe has been seeing that about us for a long time.
We're seeing it now America. Our culture, from the top
to the bottom is the Simpsons. You know, we've got
Bart literally running the country in the sense, and we've
got so and what is Bart or what is his father?
Speaker 2: Do you know?
Speaker 3: And Bart's like, don't have a cow man? And you know,
all these things like this is the cartoon. We are
in the cartoon. We can't change this until we recognize
that we've got to be the adult in the in
the room, and that we cannot think that we can
do this by giving away our power. Because as John Lewis,
who you served in Congress with, always told us about
the importance of the vote, and people took that for granted.
Speaker 2: The vote is the most important thing.
Speaker 3: And if we don't get that today, then we're not
going to recognize that.
Speaker 2: On November third, twenty twenty six.
Speaker 3: They're going to do whatever they can to to take
more of that away from us.
Speaker 2: I'm just gonna go back to this too, slavery.
Speaker 3: We act as if I won't say all of us,
but some of us act as if civil rights began
with nineteen sixty three, nineteen sixty civil rights movement, and
it didn't or that the civil rights movement was like
the beginning of our history.
Speaker 2: It wasn't. We've got to go all the way back
to the beginning.
Speaker 3: This woman being killed reminds me of the woman who
died in during the Civil rights movement, Viola driving some
of that during the bus boycott.
Speaker 1: Teba. We're going to come forward. I'm Jesse Jackson Junior
on KBLA Talk fifteen to eighty more. When we come forward,
we'll pick right up where we left off. I'm Jesse
Jackson Junior listening to conversations with a Tiba on KBLA
Talk fifteen club on BLA Talk and on Thursdays his
newly scheduled hour, our conversations with Atiba will commence. Welcome
forward to the Jesse Jackson Junior Show and Conversations with
the Tiba. Atiba. Hey, Jesse Hey, Tiva, just before the break,
you were making the comparison between miss Good in Minnesota
and the tragic loss of the life of viol Luitso
from Selma to Montgomery.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, just overall, I'm kind of speechless right
now because I feel like there are all these different
things that are happening that are metaphors and lessons and
something for us to use out of this, and we've
got I think we we have to go back and
talk about the past, because the past has a way
maybe not a repeating itself, but it dagon certainly rhymes.
Speaker 2: And so.
Speaker 3: Renee's death and passing in Minneapolis, I feel the same
way I feel about George Floyd that I.
Speaker 2: Hope that it's not in vain. And the only way
that we can make sure that.
Speaker 3: It's not in vain is for us to pick up
and recognize that through our own veins flows blood, and
that blood connects us far more than this on the
surface color, because there are people of all different ethnicities
that have A and B and O and O negative
oh plus et cetera, et cetera. That we're more connected
by what's in our veins than we are by what's
in our color, and part of that connection is also
in our tissues. I use the term that our issues
are in our tissues. So this whole idea that you know,
it's white versus black, and Muslim versus Christian and gender
this and it's not you know, John Glenn, when he
was in Out of Space said how could anyone believe that.
Speaker 2: There isn't a God?
Speaker 3: And I know that there are people that are questioning
how is God and why is God letting this happen?
And my answer is that because we dropped the ball,
we have got so caught up in me and we've
forgotten about.
Speaker 1: We Yeah, yeah, let me ask this question to you.
But often on our show I asked, I ask our
regular contributors to share with our audience how they can
be supportive of your work. Tell us about Saving Grayson.
Where we can get your book.
Speaker 2: Thank you for that.
Speaker 3: It's ironic, you know, actually it was when when we
came up with the cover for Saving Grace. It was
a friend of mine who, after reading the manuscript thought,
like Aativa, this is justice. It's about the country, it's
about corruption, it's about power, it's about the absence of justice.
Speaker 2: Why not use a gabble.
Speaker 3: And show it breaking the flag, but not to be
derogatory about it, but to show that it's broken. But
then by the time you get back to that, you
get to your third book. The how it's the story
is putting it back together. So I say that to
say that Saving Grace, the main character's name is Anthony Grace,
which is hence the reason why it's called Saving Grace,
Who's the story starts off with him being kidnapped, and
it's all tied to a case that he's working on
something he finds in Washington, DC that he knows that
if unless people see it, that they're not going to
believe it, and it's an underc our operation. And I
say all that to say with the premise, so hopefully
that pulls some people in and gets a visual because
what we see happening today is a travesty of justice.
And so I kind of feel almost like, you know,
in terms of the cover, that it is exactly what's
happening today, and that all of us have to be
play a part in saving this and and and forming
some way to you know, how do we save Grace.
Speaker 2: How do we save ourselves?
Speaker 3: How do we save the idea that you know, we're
all in this together. But you can get my copy
of my book. You can either put my first and
last name, which is Atiba Matt June dot com, A
T I B A M A d y un dot
com and it'll redirect you to the website Novels by
a Teba dot com to.
Speaker 2: Get a copy.
Speaker 3: And if you buy a copy on my on my page,
I will sign it and put it, put a personal
message in it and send it. Or you can also
go onto Amazon and put Saving Grace and Atiba and
it will come up and you can get it either
of the physical form which I can't sign because it's
coming from Amazon, or you can get it on Kindle.
Speaker 1: Thank you very much for that. At Tiba Tiba, Miss Good,
miss Renee Good. Does she represent a turning point in
the consciousness of the nation's country for the or the
activity activity of the role that the federal government has
historically played in the States and a red line that
we may be crossing now.
Speaker 3: There's so much to unpack with that and including her
last name Good because you know, my great grandmother used
to say good better, best, never let it rest until
your good is better and your better is best.
Speaker 1: Better.
Speaker 2: It's got to make her this good.
Speaker 3: Her, you know, better in terms of our minds and
in terms of how we not just call on her,
remind ourselves of what happened, but recognize that we are
in this together. My great grandmother used to also say,
it's a good thing to remember, but a better thing
to do. Always hang with a construction gang and not
the wrecking crew. And what we see right now is
definitely is the wrecking of an idea that began two
hundred and fifty years ago this July. We are in
the midst right now of we have to we are
in a reckoning right now, and we have to realize
that we are we the people, and that the government
right now what we are seeing is not is not
representative of what we have been believed that the government
should be, and that there are a small cadre of
men and there are some others who are helping them,
that are pushing for an agenda that is for them.
It is not for us, and it's not for the
people that voted for them. They have made them believe
that this is for them.
Speaker 2: This is right now.
Speaker 3: The back door of the bank is open and they're
taking everything that we have in order to make us
enslaved to them and have to bend our need to them.
So when we think about George Floyd and we think
about the bended knee that was on his neck, and
we think about Renee Good and we think about what
happened to her, she was doing something good and she
was her life was taken from her, and that can
happen to any of us. That we all have to
figure out how we are going to come together as
a nation, because the reality is they want us to
fear them, and we have to let go the same
way that John Lewis talked about how he let go
of his fear walking across the Edmund Pettis Bridge that
after they beat him and his skull was cracked open.
When he lived through that, he didn't have any more fear.
That he was able to stand up and speak to that,
to the injustice that was going on.
Speaker 2: And all of us collectively need to lock arms together,
imagine and think about whether or not we're touching each
other or not.
Speaker 3: How those men and women crossed the bridge, even though
they were denied the opportunity to walk the first time
that they went back and they went back and they persevere.
Speaker 2: They persevere because they did.
Speaker 3: Not stop, and they said, ain't gonna let nobody turn
me around.
Speaker 1: It's going to be an interesting commemoration of the two
hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. That's
exactly what we are celebrating for the entire year, certainly
through July fourth, twenty twenty six, the two hundred and
fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. And to get
the new year started. The first chapter is probably named
Renee Good that one woman in Minnesota to start the
New years off was shot in the face by the
United States ATIPA. It's always a pleasure to have you
on the show.
Speaker 2: It's always good to be with you or Jesse.
Speaker 1: You know, we have about one minute left the tea,
But did you want to summarize for us just a
brief port of hope.
Speaker 3: I'll just summarize it or try to do with this.
We're in twenty twenty six, and it's a two hundred
and fiftieth anniversary of this country, and there's so much
that that has happened over the two hundred and fifty
year history of this nation, and there's so much that
is going on today and just for us to look
for the symbols, the symbols not just the freedom, but
the symbols that have marked oppression in this country. And
then over the course of time how people always figured
it out ways, whether or not they did it because
they wanted to or because they were forced to.
Speaker 2: Come together for the greater good.
Speaker 3: And today is like no other, perhaps more so than
ever before. It's this is our time to recognize that
we have to come together and to let go of
the fear and to take one step in front of
the other and keep marching, as you know in terms
of the staircase. Staircase that you know we have to
keep walking on faith and believe that God has something
better in store for us, but that we've got to
figure out how.
Speaker 1: To do this together. Always an amazing conversation. Thank you,
t But I'm Jesse Jackson Junior listening to Jesse jacks
Junior show. This is thought provoking. Thursdays when we come forward,
none other than doctor Johnny Mack