The
Hijacking of a Dream:
Reclaiming
Rev. Dr. King’s Legacy
by pastor
and published
author Paul J. Bern
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As we
celebrate another Martin Luther King holiday, America needs to
perform a re-assessment of what this memorial holiday truly means to
all of us. On August 28, 2011, the dedication of the Martin Luther
King, Jr. National Memorial took place on the National Mall in
Washington DC. Having the dedication of this memorial on the 48th
anniversary of the March on Washington, was clearly a symbolic
gesture — paying homage to one of the many defining moments in the
great civil rights leader’s life. However, the corporate
contributors of this event, along with many of the politicians that
were in attendance, were and are symbolic themselves. They are
symbols of everything Dr. King was, and would be, opposed to if he
were alive today. These charlatans and hucksters know very well of
this fact, which is exactly why they, together with the mainstream
media and an ever-shrinking segment of prejudiced Americans of all
colors and races, continue to desperately try to reshape the image of
Dr. King. If these people have their way, Dr. King and his legacy
will stand for nothing more than a superficial image. They fervently
wish to recreate him into someone they can feel more comfortable
with. This is why most children can only recite one quote in
relationship to Dr. King —“I have a dream.” Our kids and many
of their parents don't even know the whole message.
Rev.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stood for much more than what mainstream
America has methodically reduced him to. In fact, if he were alive
today, many of the corporate war mongering politicians, including
President Trump, would be vilifying Dr. King as if he were some
crazed angry black man. This is why we will never hear the likes of
Barack Obama quote Dr. King when he referred to the US government as
“the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”. Dr. King
said those powerful and honest words on April 4, 1967 at Riverside
Church in New York City, exactly a year before he was assassinated.
Nearly five decades later, the US government is still the greatest
purveyor of violence on earth. You can bet that the following quote
will not be read at all in King's memory:
“As
I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I
have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve
their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion
while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most
meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask — and rightly
so — what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn’t using
massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the
changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and 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. For
the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake
of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot
be silent.”
After
reading Dr. King’s “Beyond
Vietnam — A Time to Break Silence” speech, anyone still
thinking that he would be in approval of what this current
administration is doing in places like Pakistan, Egypt, Syria, Libya
and Afghanistan, need to rethink their conclusions. Dr. King was much
more than simply a man who was anti-war; he was a man who stood for
peace and social justice. He was truly a man of principles and
convictions, which is why he was unafraid of speaking truth to
so-called power. Remaining silent, as so many gutless politicians and
celebrities do today, was not an option within Dr. King’s
conscience. And because of this, he was routinely targeted by the US
government, by way of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and devils
minions such as FBI founder J. Edgar Hoover.
The
American empire’s military-industrial complex is a vastly
profitable behemoth that must be fed a steady diet of wars in order
to maintain its existence. Those who threaten the existence of this
killing machine become expendable. Dr. King’s outspokenness against
not only the Vietnam War, but also the military industrial complex,
secured his status as a target. Dr. King’s “crime” was that he
dared to challenge the conscience of a nation entangled within the
web of an imperialist war throughout Southeast Asia. Among other
things he said, “A nation that continues year after year to
spend more money on military defense than on programs of social
uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Which one of the
political frauds, or entertainers, in attendance at the dedication to
Dr. King’s memorial took such a courageous stance in solidarity
with Martin Luther King, Jr.? None, that's how many. Zero.
Over a
trillion dollars have been expended on these foreign wars since 2001
—- while people in the US are all losing their homes to
foreclosures, school systems are being de-funded, and 40,000
Americans die each year due to a lack health insurance. That's more
people than all who died in auto accidents last year. If Dr. King’s
statement is true then America’s spirit must be on life support —
needing an end to its profligate defense spending as part of a
multi-tiered remedy for rehabilitation. Dr. King knew very well about
the US government’s record of going into countries, whose
governments refused to be obsequious to their addiction to other
nation’s resources, and then destabilizing them by waging war, by
assassination of leaders, or both. These are, in fact, the kind of
immoral acts of war that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would be
completely opposed to, along with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
before that. His life should give us ample reason to come to this
conclusion, and only this conclusion. However, how many children in
America know this? Dr. King’s image has been reshaped by some
amoral adults as well as by other adults who have been purposely
mis-educated.
In
regards to people of color, especially poor people, Dr. King had a
knack for placing their living conditions within the context of
institutional racism and its impact on their communities. In 1968,
not long before his assassination, Dr. King said, “It is
incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but
they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of
the white society.” The great civil rights leader said those
words within a speech he gave to his staff at a SCLC meeting in
Frogmore, South Carolina as he was preparing them for the Poor
People’s Campaign. His commitment to black people – and poor
people in general – was the polar opposite of the last several
presidents, who seemed at times to excel at marginalizing those
demographics while catering to their corporate and military bosses.
In the
same “Beyond Vietnam” speech, Dr. King gave a prescient warning
when he said, “When machines and computers, profit motives and
property rights are considered more important than people, the giant
triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable
of being conquered.” Today in 2018 much of the world is
suffering from the impact of America’s insatiable hunger for global
domination. The USA’s runaway military industrial complex continues
to take lives away from innocent civilians in places like Venezuela,
Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Somalia and Libya, to name just a few. The
American military industrial complex creates carnage abroad while
preventing Americans from having things like a world-class
single-payer health care system. In 2018 institutional racism remains
a disease that destroys the lives of people of color in America by
way of ruthless police brutality, enforced economic inequality and
intentionally unequal school systems — to name a few. Also in 2018,
runaway capitalism is imposing economic terrorism on countless people
and their rapidly disintegrating communities. Dr. King’s words are
surely more relevant now than ever before.
The
dedication of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial was assured to be
a most superficial event replete with superficial politicians and
luminaries when it was held back in 2013. The organizers of this
event and their corporate cronies were promoting and selling
everything from expensive hotel rooms, sponsorship opportunities, to
high priced exhibitor space. In essence, they were “honoring” Dr.
King by not embracing his legacy of social justice, but by
financially capitalizing on his name. There were no speeches of
ending America’s imperialist wars, like Dr. King did. Anyone with
such a message trying to get on that stage would have been swiftly
removed by security. There were no speeches about destroying
institutional racism in America. Instead, the lie of America being a
post racist country was and still is bandied all around. Don’t
expect any talk about waging a war on poverty — after all, some of
the sponsors of this event are in fact large multinational
corporations (such as Wal-Mart, Monsanto and numerous others) that
benefit from destroying local businesses while dissuading their
workers from unionizing.
Dr.
King once said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent
about things that matter.” He also famously said, “Injustice
anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Ending
institutional racism in America, eradicating poverty and
homelessness, tearing down the US prison-industrial complex by ending
the drug wars, and stopping the US military’s destructive and
endless wars – these are the things that really matter. They matter
so much that life and death hinge upon each injustice. It is obvious
that we cannot expect Democrats or Republicans to vociferously break
their collective silence about the cauldron of social injustices that
have been brewing in America for quite some time — that job must be
ours, starting with the clergy like myself, since Congress and the
President refuse to do any such thing. We must raise our collective
voices and speak out against them and stand up for justice. As the
2018 King Holiday comes and goes, this is the greatest way we can
honor the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.!
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