Spokane7
33°
January 17, 2010 in Opinion
We’ve ignored King on war
On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Monday, hundreds of people will gather, greet friends, hear inspiring words, walk Spokane streets together and promote racial and community harmony. It’s a genuine community event, but some of us experience it more personally because our lives, faith perspectives and worldviews were transformed by the life and death of Dr. King.
Last year seemed particularly significant because of the convergence of MLK Day with the presidential inauguration of Barack Obama, a refreshing bit of history that will be forever linked to some of King’s contributions to our culture.
Unfortunately, President Obama has cast a cloud over Martin Luther King Jr. Day, regarding the most vital gifts from our 20th-century hero.
Sadly paraphrased: Rosa sat so Martin could walk. Martin walked so Barack could run. Barack backpedaled to have his war and a Nobel, too.
In an Oslo auditorium, graced 45 years earlier by Martin Luther King Jr., President Obama last month trivialized King’s choice to follow Jesus and Gandhi, suffer instead of inflict suffering, convert instead of crush. King was presented the Nobel Prize for Peace for steadfastly practicing nonviolence as he led the civil rights movement through violent threats and actual violence against African Americans, liberal activists, his family and his life. Obama was selected for the same distinction for talking the talk and igniting hope that the U.S. could lead the way to peace and reconciliation.
Obama gave an eloquent speech in Oslo, but he appeased our corporate masters, who crave distant wars, never risking their own lives and fortunes as the poor are routinely sacrificed for power and energy supremacy.
Obama undermined the honor, justifying his own quagmire, the vacuous war in Afghanistan, inherited from President George W. Bush. Avoiding the truth that we have much to lose and nothing to gain circulating war-weary troops from bleak objective to senseless atrocity, Obama smeared the success of King’s victory, which proved nonviolent action is the moral, rational and pragmatic answer to oppression and conflict. Obama dismissed the proposition that war is evil, futile and disastrous, denying that nonviolence, as taught and waged by King and Gandhi, has not failed when relentlessly and patiently practiced.
Saying Hitler could not have been stopped by nonviolent resistance, Obama slighted Norway, whose people did exactly that, sparing their country Nazi domination and the devastation suffered by countries with powerful armies.
Jimmy Carter, a former commander-in-chief, said, when he received the Peace Prize in 2002, “War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other’s children.”
Of course, Dr. King’s Nobel lecture is filled with memorable lines. It’s incomprehensible to me that Obama could ignore or contradict so many great quotes in his own speech, although we’re accustomed to lip service to King’s memory from apologists for war.
A few lines from King’s 1964 Nobel lecture, almost three years before he powerfully and specifically condemned the Vietnam War:
“This problem of spiritual and moral lag … expresses itself in three larger problems which grow out of man’s ethical infantilism. Each of these problems, while appearing to be separate and isolated, is inextricably bound to the other. I refer to racial injustice, poverty, and war.
“… (W)ar is obsolete. There may have been a time when war served as a negative good by preventing the spread and growth of an evil force, but the destructive power of modern weapons eliminated even the possibility that war may serve as a negative good. If we assume that life is worth living and that man has a right to survive, then we must find an alternative to war.”
It’s easy to name a piece of street for Dr. King. It’s difficult to see his war criticism as anything less than prophetic.
The challenge on MLK Day 2010 is to accept the fact that we have dodged the part of his example intended for us, comfortable Americans who made war and violence our default choices. To honor Dr. King, we have to change, and we have to take President Obama with us.
Rusty Nelson, who was a U.S. Army lieutenant in South Vietnam when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, spent 22 years helping staff the Peace and Justice Action League of Spokane.
A hypocrite by necessity 
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jreilly4261 on January 18 at 8:53 p.m.
When the military recruits adolescent warriors through the media of combat-simulation video games and the most battle-weary soldiers are stop-lossed and re-deployed for third, fourth, and fifth tours of duty in war zones, and there is no cry of despair from those of us at home, we have certainly lost the way drawn out for us by Martin Luther King, Jr., if we ever really knew it.
We didn’t elect MLK to the presidency, but there is still a sense of disillusionment. Barack Obama ran on our hopes. He let us fill in the blank. So we filled in the blank with Roosevelt and MLK. It is only now that we realize he never promised to be Roosevelt and MLK. It is only now that we realize we must see him as President Obama, not as our hopes incarnate.
Now we must press him for clearer statements of values to match up with his Presidential actions. We must insist on roadmaps without fill-in-the-blanks, without hopes assumed. We must weigh his steps on a level scale, a scale absent the weight of our collective benefit of the doubt.
My hopes for peace and economic prosperity are not crushed, but they are now untethered from this man who still has the potential to be a great President and a great man.
BEMatson on January 18 at 9:27 p.m.
When the author writes, “Rosa sat so Martin could walk. Martin walked so Barack could run. Barack backpedaled to have his war and a Nobel, too.” I agree that the President has backpedaled from his initial promises, yet I don’t think we should write him off just yet.
It has only been a year into his presidency, and while I am very disappointed in many of his decisions (especially the war in Afghanistan and selling out health care to corporations), being president is a job only an insane person would apply for, and I don’t envy the tough decisions that President Obama has to make.
We often elect people to office and then expect them to “fix” everything. That’s not what leaders do. Leaders serve the people, and it is up to us to tell our president (by civil disobedience or otherwise) what we desire, what is not okay with us. President Obama listens more than any other president in my lifetime, and thank God, at least, for that. But let’s stay on the streets and raise our voices in protest.
What’s more, we need to take an active part in local organizing, local government, and local protest. If we rely on Washington to fix the world, we’re ignoring our own democratic responsibility as citizens.
dancinghawk on January 19 at 11:35 a.m.
amen, @BEMatson … keep up local involvement, and vocalize and act on anti-war sentiments … don’t rely on the President to change the world … but allow him to lead the people to peaceful resolutions … give him a little time … and make sure the Profiteers from these wars have neither the loudest nor the most articulate voices … Obama stepped into a government situation heavily compromised by years of corporate power … one man cannot change this … we must all make sure we’re doing everything we can to put our country on the path of peace … Individuals, not Political Entities, have the true power over this …