Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., on the day before he was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee (April 4, 1968), where he had come to support a group of striking African-American sanitation workers, gave a speech at the Lorraine Motel entitled “I Have Been to the Mountaintop”.  Today’s broadcast of Democracy Now! included, with an interview with Memphis friends and fellow activists, an excerpt from the speech:

“Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness. One day a man came to Jesus; and he wanted to raise some questions about some vital matters in life. At points, he wanted to trick Jesus, and show him that he knew a little more than Jesus knew, and through this, throw him off base. Now that question could have easily ended up in a philosophical and theological debate. But Jesus immediately pulled that question from mid-air, and placed it on a dangerous curve between Jerusalem and Jericho. And he talked about a certain man, who fell among thieves. You remember that a Levite and a priest passed by on the other side. They didn’t stop to help him. And finally a man of another race came by. He got down from his beast, decided not to be compassionate by proxy. But with him, administering first aid, and helped the man in need. Jesus ended up saying, this was the good man, this was the great man.”

Towards the end of his life and in the beginning of the massive protests against the Vietnam war, King had turned part of his attention to criticism of war, violence, and poverty in the United States and elsewhere.  On December 11, 1964 he said that:

Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time; the need for mankind to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence. Mankind must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

We have not listened, as a nation, to Dr. King, or Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell, or Gandhi, or even to that ancient figure who is supposed to be most important in America, Jesus of Nazareth.  In response to a horrendous terrorist attack in 2001, we have exacted revenge on an extreme level on some of the terrorists and a lot more people who had little to no involvement in terrorism.  King speaks to us today:

More recently I have come to see the need for the method of nonviolence in international relations. Although I was not yet convinced of its efficacy in conflicts between nations, I felt that while war could never be a positive good, it could serve as a negative good by preventing the spread and growth of an evil force. War, horrible as it is, might be preferable to surrender to a totalitarian system. But now I believe that the potential destructiveness of modern weapons totally rules out the possibility of war ever again achieving a negative good. If we assume that mankind has a right to survive then we must find an alternative to war and destruction. “Don’t ever let anyone pull you so low as to hate them. We must use the weapon of love. We must have the compassion and understanding for those who hate us. We must realize so many people are taught to hate us that they are not totally responsible for their hate. But we stand in life at midnight; we are always on the threshold of a new dawn.”

In the “war on terrorism”, we ourselves have come to realize the truth that we are as much, or more, terrorists as a state than are those groups that attacked us.  Their terrorism is a specific strategy, and it is working because we are playing into it.  We have become oppressors in the eyes of much of the world, and not come close to acheiving even a ‘negative good’.  We have tried to defeat terrorism by becoming terrorists ourselves, as we and other powerful nations have done so often before.

We are supposedly a Christian nation.  Let this day of one of our great Christian leaders, then, be a day of repentance, of turning away from all war, starting with the war in Iraq.  We have already taken steps towards this, but our most openly Christian of presidents wants to escalate the war instead of working towards ending it as soon as possible.  He and our other leaders talk of peace in the future, but they have been doing so for some time.  King again:

And the leaders of the world today talk eloquently about peace. Every time we drop our bombs in North Vietnam, President Johnson talks eloquently about peace. What is the problem? They are talking about peace as a distant goal, as an end we seek, but one day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal we seek, but that it is a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means. All of this is saying that, in the final analysis, means and ends must cohere because the end is preexistent in the means, and ultimately destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends.

Today we remember the man who spoke all of these words passionately and relentlessly until his assassination, who embodied the ‘dangerous unselfishness’ he preached about.  And today, as we look at the past, we can also look towards the future; our own personal future and that of our nation and world.  What will we make?  Will it be a dream, or a nightmare?

- Peter Broady 

Peter Broady is a regular guy from Wasilla, Alaska, who reads and writes when he gets the chance.  He can be contacted at pbroady@gmail.com or at his current website, http://internationalnv.blogspot.com/