On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Monday, hundreds of people will gather, greet friends, hear inspiring words, walk Spokane streets together and promote racial and community harmony. It's a genuine community event, but some of us experience it more personally because our lives, faith perspectives and worldviews were transformed by the life and death of Dr. King.
Last year seemed particularly significant because of the convergence of MLK Day with the presidential inauguration of Barack Obama, a refreshing bit of history that will be forever linked to some of King's contributions to our culture.
Unfortunately, President Obama has cast a cloud over Martin Luther King Jr. Day, regarding the most vital gifts from our 20th-century hero.
Sadly paraphrased: Rosa sat so Martin could walk. Martin walked so Barack could run. Barack backpedaled to have his war and a Nobel, too.
In an Oslo auditorium, graced 45 years earlier by Martin Luther King Jr., President Obama last month trivialized King's choice to follow Jesus and Gandhi, suffer instead of inflict suffering, convert instead of crush. King was presented the Nobel Prize for Peace for steadfastly practicing nonviolence as he led the civil rights movement through violent threats and actual violence against African Americans, liberal activists, his family and his life. Obama was selected for the same distinction for talking the talk and igniting hope that the U.S. could lead the way to peace and reconciliation.
Obama gave an eloquent speech in Oslo, but he appeased our corporate masters, who crave distant wars, never risking their own lives and fortunes as the poor are routinely sacrificed for power and energy supremacy.
Obama undermined the honor, justifying his own quagmire, the vacuous war in Afghanistan, inherited from President George W. Bush. Avoiding the truth that we have much to lose and nothing to gain circulating war-weary troops from bleak objective to senseless atrocity, Obama smeared the success of King's victory, which proved nonviolent action is the moral, rational and pragmatic answer to oppression and conflict. Obama dismissed the proposition that war is evil, futile and disastrous, denying that nonviolence, as taught and waged by King and Gandhi, has not failed when relentlessly and patiently practiced.
We’ve Ignored Martin Luther King's Teachings on War
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We’ve ignored King on war
By Rusty Nelson
The Spokesman-Review, January 15, 2010
Straight to the Source
