![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
MLK is certainly the one historical figure who also had a significance personal impact on me, directly. In 1968 I sat on the steps of Sproul Plaza, listening to him as he stood 50 feet away denouncing the imperialism of the time. Today I was up early, handing out leaflets at a King Day rally for our local Peace Resource Center (la plus ca change...) Many of the young black folks there stopped at our display of pictures of the first 1000 American soldiers to die in Iraq, and we urged them to find some other way to get the things they want from life. The sorrow in their eyes as they looked at the images of the dead brought tears to my own eyes. Here's an excerpt from the leaflet we gave them--see what it says if you subsitute "Iraq" for "Vietnam."
I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.
Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem….I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.
I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government….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…marching and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy.
[W]e 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….A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
This from "Beyond Vietnam." Read the whole thing at:
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/058.html
I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.
Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem….I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.
I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government….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…marching and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy.
[W]e 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….A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
This from "Beyond Vietnam." Read the whole thing at:
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/058.html
Tags: