Monday, January 15, 2007

Has anybody here seen my old friend Martin?


I have no idea whether Mumia Abu-Jamal is guilty or innocent. I don't know whether the "Free Mumia" types are prophets, dupes or fools. You only have room for so many fights in your time here on earth, and this one ain't mine.

HOWEVER . . . even as a stopped clock is right twice a day -- and even if Mumia Abu-Jamal is the most evil, lying, nefarious cop-killer on the face of God's green earth, he has issued a
challenge well worth taking up:
Few will dare air his remarks made at Riverside Church in New York City, where an older, wiser Martin spoke, not of dreams but of realities -- of social, and especially economic injustice -- of rampant American militarism, and yes -- the nightmare of white racism.
AND SO I DO, on this commemoration of the birth of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. An excerpt from Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence, delivered nearly 40 years ago -- April 4, 1967:

Meanwhile we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must continue to raise our voices if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative means of protest possible.

As we counsel young men concerning military service we must clarify for them our nation's role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. I am pleased to say that this is the path now being chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. 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.

There is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter the struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing. 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. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. Such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.

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 counter-revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia 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 investment.

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, 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 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 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 Latin 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 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 defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

TODAY, ON THE 78th ANNIVERSARY of King's birth, some things aren't much different than they were in 1967. Others are.

But, it seems to me, the thing to do when a country discoveres that it has embarked upon a wholly unjustified war of aggression is . . . to stop it. Quit.

When you find you have dug yourself into a hole, CEASE DIGGING. When you figure out that the bunch you've installed to replace Saddam Hussein is as intent upon killing Sunni Muslims as Saddam was upon killing Shiite Muslims, QUIT PROPPING UP THE SOBs.

Lest, of course, you make the original toppling of the old tyrant look even more ridiculous than it already was.

When we have American cities (New Orleans, for one) approaching Baghdad levels of murder, mayhem and malaise, perhaps it is time to ask ourselves why, exactly, we're throwing more cash we don't have onto our present half-trillion-dollar Iraq bonfire. After all, if you're going to spend money you don't have anyway, isn't it a far better thing to spend it trying to do good for one's own citizens?

The hubris of America and her tragically deluded leaders blinds the nation to the flatulent elephant in the family room: We now live in a house of straw and -- as we fight the Muslim hordes half a world away -- just a little huff and a little puff where we least expect it . . . could bring the whole damn thing down upon us.

AND AS GEORGE BUSH pounds our miltary into the desert sand for no good reason, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her new, improved Democrat majority decide one of our most pressing needs is to fully fund
cannibalizing the tiniest of human beings in some Dr. Frankenstein quest to fix what ails us.

Has anybody here seen my old friend Martin? Can you tell me whether anybody today -- particularly our U.S. religious leaders -- might be willing to put it all on the line and speak the gospel truth to power?

Particularly when we have so much power so little acquainted with Truth.

(sound of crickets)

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