Achieving Our Country: Additional BLACK FLAG WEEK Sites

The promise of the United States,

its vision and ideals, as set forth in its founding documents (the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America) are best understood as "works in progress." The United States' failure throughout its history to live up to the lofty standards codified in those founding documents in no way lessens their meaning, nor their value. The good that the United States has in fact achieved since 1776 has served to reinforce the idea of a country striving, by design, to be better than its all-too-human and very imperfect nature. Most important, those ideals exist as real, true things that We, the People can achieve. It's the hopeful intent of this site to discuss and facilitate ways of actually achieving our nation, and thereby continue to form, as the Constitution exhorts, a more perfect union.

The title ''Achieving Our Country''

is drawn from the famous last sentence of James Baldwin's ''Fire Next Time.'' There, Baldwin called on the saving remnant, ''the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks,'' to ''end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.'' The point of invoking James Baldwin, of course, is that he was entirely unforgiving of his country's sins and still looked forward with hope to a better future. A left that fights for the political and economic changes that will ''achieve our country'' is the left that the United States once possessed and needs as much as ever, but is hardly to be seen.
--from a book review: "The New New Left"
by Alan Ryan

08 March 2008

Additional BLACK FLAG WEEK Sites - From Karen M

Via email, Karen relayed the following additional sites (which will join the Resource list at left):
WATANDOST: Inside News about Pakistan and Its Neighborhood

Watandost in Urdu and farsi means "friend of the country". The blog contains news and commentaries about Pakistan (and its neighbors) that are intriguing and insightful but often are not part of the news headlines. Issues related to "Islam and the West" are also covered here.

An illuminating WATANDOST entry dated Saturday 8 March is entitled A Tribute to the Unknown Lawyer.

Karen notes that it is "(n)ot just a tribute... also has info about efforts to set up a trust fund for lawyers to offer more substantial support.... Sounds like an idea that really needs some help."

an excerpt:

In the course of the last one year, countless lawyers and several judges stepped forward, at considerable personal cost, to fight for this cause. While some resigned from public offices as a mark of protest, there were many others who actually carried their protest onto the streets. Certainly, none of them were trained to endure the physical hardship of long arduous marches in inclement weather, arbitrary imprisonments or police beatings and teargas, or for that matter the ensuing financial hardship. Only a small number of these lawyers had the strength to carry the inevitable financial burden. A large number of them were junior, subsistence lawyers who depended upon the daily court proceedings to earn a living. Many of them belonged to the smaller districts where the opportunity to work was in any event limited and several were supporting families who depended upon them for their livelihood....

...Even more than the leaders, we must honour and salute these nameless thousands because they are the true heroes and the beacons of the lawyers' movement....

Karen refers us further to these two blog posts for some personal takes on the Emergency, the protests, and Black Flag Week:

KO: Of Judges and Hope

Anupam Chander writes about "Globalization and digitization through the eyes of a California law professor."