By Barry Gan
St. Bonaventure, NY – Yes, yes, I know. Martin Luther King, Jr. had a dream. But what most people don't hear is that in addition to his vision of what this country could be, he had a vision of how this country could get there.
King believed that our country could be great, but only if we re-ordered our spending priorities and approached our problems nonviolently. We have not followed his advice, and we are no closer today to the dream than we were on the day King was gunned down.
In the past month, a bill to reinstate the draft for all males between the ages of 18 and 22, no college deferment, was introduced in Congress. In the past four months Congress has authorized the expenditure of tens of billions of dollars to combat terrorism, but it doesn't seem able to find money to prevent teacher layoffs.
Nor does Congress know what to do with welfare reform, which worked well when there were jobs to be had but isn't working so well now that unemployment is on the rise. One solution: throw people into the armed forces. If $300 billion per year wasn't enough to protect us from terrorism, maybe $350 billion will be. Better to pay more people to serve in the armed forces than to fund private industry to build a national railroad system, than to provide state-subsidized universal health care, than to enable senior citizens to afford prescription drugs.
When Martin Luther King, Jr. was gunned down, he was speaking against these kinds of spending priorities. The FBI found it necessary to tape his extramarital affairs and send the tapes to his wife in an effort to destroy King's image and power. Some of King's aides -― Jim Lawson, for example, who brought him to Memphis -- believe to this day that the F.B.I. killed King. Even the King family wanted a trial for James Earl Ray, a trial he never got because the court refused to accept his change of plea from guilty to not guilty.
What was King saying that so many people feared? In a speech that he gave at the Riverside Church in New York City exactly one year before he was assassinated, King said: "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
He continued: >[? "In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which now has justified the presence of U.S. military 'advisors' in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counter-revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and why American napalm and green beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, 'Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.'"
Nothing has changed in the 34 years since King's assassination. Our helicopters are used in Israel to suppress the Palestinians. Our troops are now fighting in the Philippines. We had troops in Uzbakistan long before the World Trade Center was attacked. Our helicopters are being used to suppress in Turkey a Kurdish revolt that we support in Iraq.
King said: "I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must 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."
So when we celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. on his birthday, let's remember that in addition to his dream, he mapped out a nonviolent strategy for achieving it, and that we have turned away from his dream because we have turned away from his strategy.
Barry Gan is a professor of Philosophy at St. Bonaventure University.