[Thanks RJ for the forward]
TheStar.com - Life - Rev. King remembered
January 20, 2007
Stephen Scharper
This past Monday, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., would have turned 78. He has been dead as long as he was alive – 39 years – and the world and especially his country are still grappling uneasily with his memory and message.
As Seattle journalist Geov Parrish has noted, many often recall King's "I Have a Dream" speech from the 1963 March on Washington. But our memories of King are often selective.
We don't always recall, for example, that his home was bombed, his chest pierced by a knife, his body beaten and repeatedly jailed, his face rendered a spittoon by white racists, his personal world invaded by theFBI, and his life, and that of his wife and four children, constantly menaced by death threats, at times up to 40 a day.
Though each year on his birthday, now an official U.S. holiday, we are reminded of his lofty rhetoric and successful desegregation campaign inthe U.S. South, we seem to forget about mainstream U.S. scorn for Kingduring his lifetime, and his widely held sobriquet, "Commie dupe." We often even forget that he was a Baptist minister, and that his Christian faith and black church community served as wellsprings of his activism.
Yet our recollections become particularly dissipated when it comes tohis powerful indictments of poverty, state-sanctioned violence, and unchecked U.S. militarism, especially in Vietnam.
One of King's most prescient and compelling speeches, in fact, is one ofhis least quoted – his April 1967 address to a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned about Vietnam at Riverside Church in New York City. It was the first time King spoke out publicly against the war, and his outspokenness continued until he was silenced by a bullet in Memphis one year later.
King's diagnosis of our society that night remains as pertinent today as it did 40 years ago:
"I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution," Rev. King intoned, "we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly 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."
Anticipating the Jubilee international debt relief campaigns of Canada,the U.S. and the U.K. (not to mention U2's Bono), King continued:
"True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa andSouth America, only to take the profits out with no concern for thesocial betterment of the countries, and say: `This is not just.'"
In light of the Bush administration's failed and morally insupportable invasion of Iraq, and Bush's recent order to escalate U.S. troop commitment there, [Lesley's side note... I read something yesterday that caught my attention.... when did troop start to mean individual persons?] King's words could have been uttered yesterday:
"The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: `This way of settling differences is not just. This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love.'
"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defence than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
King's speech invites us to pause and reflect on what kind of future we want for our children and ourselves. Do we want a future marked by endless war? Do we want to live in a future increasingly divided into the desperately poor and insouciantly rich?
King had a dream, and he asks us, across the years, to ponder what our own dream as a society might be. He also invites us to ensure that our collective dream is not a nightmare.
No comments:
Post a Comment