Tue 22 Jan 2008
photo: Time
With apologies to Thanksgiving, I would have to say that MLK day is probably the only federal holiday that I take the time to sit down and reflect on the meaning of the day and what an important voice his was.
Here is a link to a speech recommended to me (thanks Rose!) that contains the written text or play the audio to hear it below.
In his “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” speech delivered at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 — a year to the day before he was murdered — King called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”
Wait for the whole thing to download…
Hope everyone had a great MLK Day.
January 22nd, 2008 at 10:55 pm
MLK’s opposition to the Vietnam War is an often overlooked aspect of his legacy. I suppose it is more controversial (in retrospect, to be sure) than his stands on civil rights. It strikes me that some of his concerns about the Vietnam War - primarily that it was fought by people of color against other people of color, largely at the behest of and for the benefit of, people not of color - have some parallels in the current misadventure in Iraq.
In that war, children of privilege got numerous exemptions from military service, largely for education. “I had other priorities” as VP Cheney put it. The purpose of this was to isolate the powerful and influential from the impacts of the war, for the purpose of continuing an unpopular war. In Iraq, we have an all volunteer force, true, but the children of the privileged still rarely serve. Look at the Romney family - statistically, at least one of his five male children should have had some military experience. Further, we subcontract out a lot of the support services outside of the military. It’s a lot easier politically to pay a working class person $100K to work as a bus driver in Iraq than to pay a draftee $20K a year to do the same job. And, hey, it’s only our kids who will have to pay that price off with compound interest. Of course, this also selects for putting more of the working class in the war zone - all other things being equal, would you rather make your $100K working for daddy’s hedge fund or driving truck in Iraq? Of course, not everyone has the opportunity to make $100K at a hedge fund…
At any rate, the cynical calculations that went on in the Vietnam War still continue today. To perpetuate an unpopular war, this administration uses money instead of race, but the outcome is the same. When our country goes to war, we should go to war together, not parceled out by class like we used to be by race. We should all bear the costs of a war, so that we can all know the cost. Where’s the sense of shared sacrifice? I’m glad MLK had such great success uniting the races in this country. I think he’d be sad to see how much we’re still willing to be divided by class.
January 26th, 2008 at 10:23 pm
MLK… i heart you.
Still one of the greatest speeches ever written.