Martin Luther King Jr., was a man of visions and determination, a man willing to put his body, his life and his ideas on the line to change the course of America’s Dream of equality and Justice for all her people. His life was his story, and toward the end of it King was able to sum up much of what has gone very-wrong with this country and consequently the world that is now cringing on the edge of oblivion. 

The contrasts between Doctor King’s ‘Dreams’ and our actions; when filtered through the twisted propaganda of the last forty years, leaves millions more conflicted as never before. Because as America celebrates Martin Luther King Day, in the shadow of the inauguration of Barack Obama tomorrow: It is clear that while the new selection for the Oval Office is black, that is the only thing that has changed for the better. Everything else is either the same or much, much worse, depending on what is being studied. 

Part of this problem is due our tendency to cast everything into overly-simplified equations that upon a-closer-look, tend to become the mirror opposite of what they might appear to be.

The intensification of US military might, after Vietnam coupled with our political and psychological fantasies, are now being used to justify the unjustifiable, in the Middle East and throughout the world. If the failures in Vietnam had been understood on any of the levels that were obvious at that time – then, by now, we would have begun to realize much of what Martin Luther King came to say; forty years ago. 

Instead, while millions celebrate this day, millions more can see the horror of having this totally unqualified stand-in; serving in place of the fighter that was and is still needed. King died trying to obtain, ‘real change’ in the USA; so did Kennedy and Lincoln. Obama just says: “I am the Change!” 

If we accept this childish boast instead of challenging Barack to actually ‘Do Something’ that will improve the lives of regular people – not just here but in the world, then we are potentially destined to reap the other half of what ‘Changes’ can sometimes provoke: that could potentially be a world-ending ‘Cataclysm.’ 

Obama is just ridding the coat-tails of everyone from Lincoln and Kennedy to King, having done absolutely nothing himself, to further any of the higher purposes that all three of those men at least attempted to change, in the course of their lives. All three paid for their political convictions with their lives. Obama has yet to prove that he can do anything except swear his undying allegiance to Israel, or ‘write a speech.’ Any ‘leader’ worth that title ought to be able to do far more, but this is 2009.

Here is some of What Martin Luther King had to say about the choices we faced by waging that illegal and unjust war in Vietnam.

“These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.

The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing clergy- and laymen-concerned committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia.

In 1957, a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years, we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression, which now has justified the presence of U.S. military “advisors” in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why American napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago, he said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” 

Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments.

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, 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, extreme materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. 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 and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, “This is not just.” 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 peoples 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 defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and through their misguided passions urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not engage in a negative anti-communism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity and injustice, which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops. [The same is true in Gaza and many other places].

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wombs of a frail world new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. “The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light.” We in the West must support these revolutions.” ⁽¹⁾

“We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says, “Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word.”

Bush re-introduced us to ‘Good & Evil” but that is not the right equation. Yes there is Evil in the world, but it is countered by the Innocence that is potential- unbounded. “Good” is something that we can all sometimes do, just as evil is something that can invade a mind that does not remotely know itself. 

“We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: “Too late.” There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam writes, “The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on…” We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.

Now, let us begin. Now, let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter – but beautiful – struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.”

What we chose instead was Fascism Inc. In a monarchy the King has a responsibility to balance his rule over the lives of his subjects. What we created was the half-shell world of politicians that could be created from the fallen leaves of yesterday’s news: And that will vanish with every changing of the season. The middle-road is the one place no leader seems to turn to any longer – and since the public has withdrawn from citizenship in favor of the much greater ‘fun’ of consumerism – we’ve become nothing more than numbers on the ledger sheets of corporations and governments to be used, abused and cast aside whenever there’s a drop in profits anywhere.

“As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently stated:

Once to every man and nation 

Comes the moment to decide, 

In the strife of truth and falsehood, 

For the good or evil side; 

Some great cause, God’s new Messiah, 

Off’ring each the bloom or blight, 

And the choice goes by forever 

Twixt that darkness and that light.

Though the cause of evil prosper, 

Yet ‘tis truth alone is strong; 

Though her portion be the scaffold, 

And upon the throne be wrong: 

Yet that scaffold sways the future, 

And behind the dim unknown, 

Standeth God within the shadow 

Keeping watch above his own.” ⁽¹⁾

‘Vision’ requires the ‘sacrifice’ that’s needed to have that which is desired. Without the sacrifice there can be no vision worth the effort needed to conceive it. Here the sacrifice is represented by the hole upon which we tend to build our free-floating “Castles of the Heart.”

Reagan spoke often of America as ‘the shining city on the hill.’ But his plan for us to obtain ‘our’ gleaming city was based on ‘Greed’ and specifically upon the lack of care for any other-people, because for Reagan and his followers, the only ones that ever mattered here and now were just the tiny number-oneness of ourselves.

The USA has lost its rudder and its social compass as a people – in fact we are “a people” no longer: we’re just a collection of opportunists; a herd of raging appetites looking for the next ‘fix’ or the next situation to take unfair advantage of. Had we listened to Dr. King, or to our private voice of conscience this would be a wholly different world – instead we listened to our darker angels, and now we no longer control our actions or our lives. We sold our reputations to several co-related criminal-conspiracies that each promised us that magic elixir: “Something for nothing!”

Tomorrow literally shall mark the beginning of the end of this country, as a people or as an idea that has any merit in the wider world. Many people want an answer to this impending crash, a simple answer: one in which they shall not be inconvenienced, and wherein they can of course keep their toys and their ‘lifestyles.’ That possibility ceased when we stopped participating in the political life of the nation. That came to an end when as individuals we stopped questioning government, the corporations or anyone in authority: we have, as they say: “been had!”

King wanted equality and justice for all. Yet we have more people in jail now than any other nation on earth, and our ‘public-servants’ treat us like rabid–dogs or mindless idiots; yet we do not complain. Our government steals from us, brutalizes us, and now has bankrupted not just us, but most of the rest of the planet. We have had forty years to ‘begin’ to change our lives, but we were far too busy being greedy, self-absorbed and ‘on-track for success’ regardless of whatever else that effort might have cost us.

So enjoy your gala-celebration; be sure to buy your limited edition posters and your commemorative plates, and don’t forget the videos! That’s all you’re going to get from the Messiah, a bunch of words and photo-ops: If you were expecting something more, you’re not living in ‘Amerika’ today. 

Jim Kirwan

NOTES:

1) Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 1929-1968

www.kirwanesque.com/politics/articles/2009/art10.htm