Are We Still a Society Gone Mad on War?

Are We Still a Society Gone Mad on War?
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"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 byron@byronspeaks.com or go to his website, byronspeaks.com

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