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On this day 93 years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. was born. How will we honor his life and vision on this Monday’s holiday?
Dr. King’s message is one with that of Jesus: Each life is precious, worthy of love and dignity; we are called to love our neighbor and renounce violence toward those deemed as enemies.
Dr. King spoke out not only against racial segregation but against the overall structure of a society that is sickened with violence. He repeatedly cited the “giant triplets” of racism, poverty and militarism as the great obstacles to creating the beloved community Jesus envisioned. Whether speaking of White supremacy in Birmingham, war in Vietnam or the struggle of workers for economic justice, Dr. King consistently referred to the “single garment of destiny” in which our lives are interrelated.
King went to Memphis in April 1968 to support striking sanitation workers, Black and underpaid, against the advice of fellow civil rights workers who insisted such a labor struggle was not important enough to risk his life. On the contrary, he boldly declared, their work was as vital to our health as that of physicians. Without either group, he said, humanity would be the helpless prey to disease. In this and other ways, Dr. King linked the struggle for racial justice to the struggle to overcome poverty and economic injustice.
Dr. King was likewise urged in 1967 not to speak out against the US war in Vietnam for fear it would dilute advances in civil rights. Again, King was adamant about making the connection between racial injustice, poverty at home and the violence of military action toward poor Asians in a faraway land:
“We were taking Black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8,000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest Georgia and East Harlem. We have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools.”
In 1960, President Eisenhower had pointed to “every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired (as) a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” Similarly, Dr. King wrote:
“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death … We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools … The choice today is no longer between violence or nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence.”
As we approach Monday’s holiday, we would do well to not only hold up MLK’s vision of racial and economic justice but to likewise understand his critique of militarism as a corrosive force wearing down the moral character of our country, that we as a people have increasingly embraced militarism as a way of life that is based on fear and hypersecurity.
Militarism is coercion through the threat of violence, whether spoken or acted upon. It sanctions the idolatry of weapons of mass destruction and the unnecessary use of lethal weapons by police; it is the combative rhetoric of intimidation and hate which impels the siege in Charlottesville and on our Capitol, the rise of racist militias and an epidemic of assault rifles; militarism promotes a culture of bullying which infects our young and increasingly licenses citizens to threaten and attack one another.
Let us try to embrace Dr. King’s vision of the interrelatedness of racism, poverty and militarism as he did. And may we find a way to live in peace with one another.
Ben Tousley is a spiritual counselor, writer and musician. He lives in Greenfield.