J. Period - Civil Rights Radio (Excerpt 2) lyrics

Let's tune into the Civil Rights Radio of the future, because as Dr King said back in 1967, “tomorrow is today.” If we spin the dial to, say, the year 2040, what will the march on Washington sound like? What then will be what Dr King called “the fierce urgency of now"? What dreams will we still need to have? Will we still be watching Florida and Arizona? Or will our eyes be on the next Tahrir Square? Will there be a p**y Riot in Detroit? Will Jay-Z get Harry Belafonte's point, that the true enemy is unbridled capitalism? Will Occupy be back? Will it be an American spring, will Dr King's vision of shirtless and landless people rising up as never before in a world made frail by exploitation and poverty still be true? What revolutionary times lie ahead? By then, the US will be, for the first time in its history, a majority Black, Latino, and Asian country. The freedoms we will march for, the movements we will launch, will need to be more collaborative than ever before, more multi-hued than ever before. The songs we will need to sing will be in English and Spanish, yes, but also Mandarin and Korean, Arabic and Somali, Hmong and Khmer, Hausa and Swahili. They will be songs of movement and distance that crossfade America with multiple ‘over theres' and 'back homes,' songs that grapple with nearly a century of economic globalization, privatization, and outsourcing. They will be songs that urge us to do what King asked us to back in 1967, to “begin the shift from a 'thing-oriented' society to a 'person-oriented' society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.” That dream will surely live on then and as it lives on now. We will always, understandably, get hung up on the “Blurred Lines” and the “Get Lucky”s but the greatest summer song of all, the true hit song that never goes away, is the freedom song. It's the one that always keeps us dancing in the streets, the one that locks our arms with the arms of another, the one helps us find our voice, the one that always reminds us what love really means.