Are We Still a Society Gone Mad on War?

Show your support.
Buzz this article up.

• Share
• Print View
• Comments

"If you succumb to the temptation of using violence in your struggle, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and your chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos."
-- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Forty years ago, a shot pierced the deafening disharmony of a sanitation workers strike in Memphis, leaving Martin Luther King, the man who valiantly served as America's moral conscience by appealing to its better angels, dead in a pool of blood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel.

April 4, 1968 was the exclamation point of a five-year odyssey that took King from the apex of his popularity and the shouts of "Hosanna" as he told America about his "dream" to the collective chants of "crucify him" as his popularity declined under the weight of his courageous stand to oppose the war in Vietnam.

The same Time Magazine that named King its 1963 "Man of the Year" was in 1967 calling his speech in opposition to Vietnam--which coincidently was given April 4, 1967--as a "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi." The Washington Post commented that King had "diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."

In retrospect, the Post's critique appears misguided at best, but there also remains an honestly about it that haunts America to the present day.

At the time of his death, King's usefulness had diminished in white and black communities alike. The urban riots of the 1960's helped to fuel "Black Power" as the voice of a frustrated people. Chants of "burn baby burn" replaced the Civil Rights Movement's anthem of "We Shall Overcome."

The largely mainstream white press that praised King for his commitment to nonviolence in the wake of second-class citizenship in the Jim Crow South, thought differently as King expanded his critiques internationally.

But the shift in public perception missed the evolution of King's thinking. King had come to the conclusion that landmark civil rights legislation alone did little for the glaring economic inequality among poor blacks and whites.

King lamented in his speech opposing the war in Vietnam that the hope he held out for poverty programs designed to help those on the margins were being "broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war."

Are those not applicable words today? Are we as a nation not stuck in political paralysis, unable to fix Social Security or provide healthcare for all, stagnated by the insanity of war and its ravenous appetite that consumes roughly $9 billion per month?

King's words that made the country most uncomfortable, at a time when discomfort was in order, are all but forgotten today. Could not the nation use a little discomfort right about now?

Though an overwhelming majority now opposes the Iraq war, we have yet to reach the nexus that would allow us to transcend our discomfort in order to put an end to a dark chapter in American history.

In the 40 years since his death, it has been preferable for the country to enshrine King into the sacred halls of martyrdom through public adoration, making a deal with itself to praise a selective, easy to digest King legacy--one that did not include economic boycotts and a global analysis linking America's interventionist policies to sustained poverty domestically.

To do anything to the contrary would be to acknowledge that King was always at his best when the country's public morality was at its worst.

When the struggle was confined to the South, King was indeed a lauded figure. Segregationists like Birmingham Police Commissioner, Eugene "Bull" Connor and Alabama Governor, George Wallace were at a disadvantage; their public displays of hatred were no match for King's eloquent soliloquies for equality.

But the moment King's micro lens on the South expanded into a macro lens that looked at America as whole; he became irrelevant in black and white communities.

King had indeed diminished his usefulness, at least to the media, many of his supporters, and a number of elected officials that supported his cause for civil rights. In expanding his thinking, King may, however, have rendered no greater service to his cause, his country, and to his people--the American people.

Byron Williams is an Oakland pastor and syndicated columnist. He is the author of "Strip Mall Patriotism: Moral Reflections of the Iraq War." E-mail him at [e-mail] or go to his website, byronspeaks.com

Comments

[BadChristian]

I'm really sorry this post didn't get more responses, Mr. Williams. I thought it was the best of the day, and I was hoping for a lot of people's opinions.

My opinion is;
We're not just mad about war... We're mad about anything that can cause conflict. We're absolutely addicted to be "Either for or against."

It's sexy.
It sells.

From there, who is willing to fight the most, and the dirtiest, is the best kind of person... It proves something.
While some people profess to be for ending the divisiveness, I don't think it's true. Every community is to be divided, every church, every neighborhood, every race and even every family... "Triangulated" into animosity and then "Capitalized" upon (or "Branded").

Peaceful people are the worst kind of people. They're boring and they're sissies.
Watch television, Byron. Watch the ads, and, unfortunately, you'll see what America wants. Who they want, and who they want to be (when they grow up, because no one wants to be old).

America has been led by television broadcasters, if "24" says it's okay to torture... Well... it works on us.

We're mad on any excuse to get mad... Especially war.

[grendl]

What Martin Luther King fails to address is that it took a war to give blacks a voice in this country, the Civil War.

Had it not happened, who knows when slavery would've ended, when black people would be allowed to vote. War was necessary.

As it was to defeat Adolph Hitler's dream of world domination. Sometimes war is necessary, when someone is willing to resort to force to get what they want. The problem with the left, is their failure to acknowledge that the use of force is always an option, and this shared dream of universal peace and harmony is just that, a dream. It requires participation of everyone, and there are just too many people on the planet, and too much self interest embedded in the human genome to guarantee such a thing.

There will always be violence, always be crime, always be rape, always be terror, and always be war. We will never ascend to a higher plane wherein such things don't exist. Or the possibility isn't present.

The Civil War allowed a Martin Luther King to deliver his message. So wars aren't all bad, when ignorance and evil are the enemy.

[FearlessFreep]

Compare King to Malcolm X in his last days, when black Moslems turned against him while whites still considered him beyond the pale.

Wars are always popular until the bills--and the casualty lists--start coming in.

[Nommo]

To suggest that those who don't know or learn history are bound to repeat it is beyond banality, but perfectly apt. That Dr. King be so convenient and timely a hook for the entire nation's projection is as telling. That he could be so easily the target for such focused rage and dismissal then and 40 years after his assassination to be lauded or dragged out for company to see is sick. Tomorrow is just a solemn day, that's all. The lies that accompany his murder are still lies, the insistence on his dream instead of his genius and insight, the failure to acknowledge this nation's failure to protect and honor its best are all indicators that on April 4, 2008, no one need to hear another word or see another picture of the march on DC. There is but one choice. Take heed or just forget about it. We are alive today who are alive.

[hopeless277]

Heeeeeell, yes!!! And we're lovin' every second of it!!! USA, USA, USA. Fight, fight, fight. Win, win, win. Gooooooooooooooooooooooooooo team!!!!

[Nommo]

I'd say we are mad about war, we can hardly stay out of 'em. Seems like that goes back a good ways, too.