DISPATCHES: Martin Luther King’s radical message

DISPATCHES by Hank Kalet: Dr. King’s words echo during today’s current state of affairs.

   "We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-oriented’ society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered."

— The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in a speech given at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967
   It is easy to think of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. simply as a civil rights leader. That, after all, is the dominant image of the man in our society.
   As the national King holiday approaches, we are being greeted with the standard images: The African-American boycott of bus services in Montgomery, Ala., in the mid-1950s, the anti-segregation marches in Birmingham and Selma, Ala., and the speeches — in particular, his speech at the 1963 March on Washington at which he declared that he had a "dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ … I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
   These depictions are accurate only to a point. They ignore Dr. King’s larger criticisms of American society. Dr. King, who would have turned 74 yesterday (Wednesday), was a much more radical thinker than we seem willing to admit, a man who pushed hard for comprehensive anti-poverty programs, who opposed the United States’ misadventures in Vietnam, who was deeply critical of our foreign policy as one aligned with money and power and not with people.
   "Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken," he said during a speech given at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967. "The role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment."
   In the speech, given exactly a year to the day before he was assassinated in Memphis, he called for the United States to "undergo a radical revolution of values."
   "We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-oriented’ society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered."
   He called Vietnam "a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit" in which American military force is used "to maintain social stability for our investments" abroad in Guatemala, in Peru, in Colombia and across the globe.
   "A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies," he told the crowd at the Riverside Church. He added that "true compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.
   "A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: ‘This is not just.’
   "It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: ‘This is not just.’ The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.
   "A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: ‘This way of settling differences is not just.’ This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
   Dr. King’s words seem prophetic now, with the United States on the brink of war with Iraq, with the North Koreans threatening a resumption of the nuclear arms race, with much of the Arab world angry and ready to explode.
   It is time for us to heed his words, to change our swords into plowshares, to use our economic might to reach out to the rest of the world as a neighbor and a friend, rather than using our military strength to pave the way for more riches for those who already have plenty.
   "If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight," Dr. King said.
Hank Kalet is managing editor of the South Brunswick Post. He can be reached at [email protected].