Honoring MLK's Legacy
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. originally supported President Lyndon Johnson for the Great Society initiative which the executive promoted. The ambitious initiative was intended to widen access to better jobs, education and housing for disadvantaged Americans, allocating billions of dollars to various federal programs for these purposes. Dr. King ultimately grew disillusioned with President Johnson’s deepening involvement in the war in Vietnam, as the war diverted from the Great Society billions of dollars, half a million able-bodied men, and otherwise upstaged domestic progress in the press with grisly daily accounts from the front lines in Southeast Asia.
Dr. King opposed the war along the lines of race and class, remarking that “The war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home… 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.” At Harlem’s Riverside Presbyterian Church in 1967, Dr. King mordantly summarized his opposition to the war as, “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.”
Nearly sixty years later, nothing has changed. The military mainly preys on those with bleaker economic prospects, with a handful of LARPing elitists sprinkled in as they build résumé for future political office. The biggest beneficiaries of military service are the military-industrial stockholders who contribute to both candidates in federal campaigns, so that their corporations exert influence no matter who gets elected. Whilst there remain numerous crucial domestic issues to remedy – electoral integrity, civil asset forfeiture, qualified immunity, the Federal Reserve System, etc. – our sons and lately daughters ship off to “defend democracy” in countries which never are and which most Americans couldn’t even find on a map.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. saw the game for what it is… and paid the heaviest price for his acumen. Let’s honor his legacy by recognizing our shared humanity with one another regardless of race or borders, and avowedly rejecting those who’d pit us as strangers against one another for their own profit!
Nicely put as usual!
I have mixed feelings about our armed forces. On the one hand I do think that they can take boys and make them into men. Building capacity of people who enlist so that they can serve their country and then their community seems to be a worthwhile endeavor.
I also do believe that having the capacity for violence without using it is important for men to build. We need to be able to defend ourselves to the best extent that we can at the individual level and at the national level.
But on the other hand with every war we are absolutely enriching a few corporations at the expense of everyone else. The spin machine that uses our patriotic notions to allow for immoral wars couldn't happen if we were better at thinking about when we should engage in violence.
I don't see a way to put this genie back in the bottle.