With a recent Associated Press hatchet job story and character assassination of Martin Luther King Jr coming out in the US mainstream, echo chamber media with it’s pigeonholing Dr King into a corner as only a “black leader” and freezing his life in that August 1963 speech in the US capital speech on civil rights when the struggle was primarily in the US South, we have a full fledged ghettoization of Dr King which we need to remedy by bringing out the real Dr King. The attack on Dr King has been one of talking about he “chain smoked,” used alcohol, and used rough language. Can charges of him “chewing gum in class be far behind?” “Chasing women,” J Edgar Hoover’s favorite almost surely will be brought out of the shadows. But he was human, “Surprise!” Now “assassinate” the below US mainstream media.
Today on this planet as Martin Luther King Jr said in his Christmas sermon he delivered in his Atlanta church “Our world is sick with war; everywhere we turn we see its ominous possibilities,” because as Dr King said “if we don’t have good will toward men in this world, we will destroy ourselves by the misuse of our own instruments and our own power.” “The Christmas hope of peace on earth and good will toward men” Dr King pointed out “can no longer be dismissed as a dream of some utopian.”
As Dr King concluded “We must either learn to live together as brothers or we are all going to perish together like fools.” “Life is interrelated” as he made so clear.” “We are all caught up in an inescapable network of mutuality tied into a single garment of destiny.”
Dr King made the point of the link between US militarism and racism and poverty which neither the US power elites nor the echo chamber press liked in the least.
When Dr King gave this sermon he talked about his visit to India and how that had depressed him, but he could have just as easily today been talking about Haiti. Just substitute Haiti for India in this sermon and it works great and substitute some Haitian city for some Indian city starting with Dr King saying “How can one avoid being depressed when one sees with one’s own eyes evidences of millions (maybe a smaller number for Haiti) people going to bed hungry at night. How can one avoid being depressed when one sees with one’s own eyes thousands of people sleeping on sidewalks at night.”
He referred to those in the “million in Bombay” and “a half million in Calcutta.” Though the numbers may be smaller in absolute terms they’re still huge in Haitian cities. Dr King put it so well when he challenged “How can we in America stand by and not be concerned?”
Then Dr King’s answer came: In the USA “we spend millions of dollars (currently the figure may be different but the point is the same) to store surplus food.” He said he knew where we “could store that food free of charge– in the wrinkled stomachs of the millions of God’s children in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and even in our own nation, who go to bed hungry at night.” Yes, hunger or the food insecurity as those who like to use euphemisms was and is alive today and well in the USA. We have surpluses for some and nothing for too many others and with regard to money so much surplus for so few and so little for 90 per cent or 95 per cent. What is true of money is true as well of that which money can buy– housing, health care, clothing, and otherwise.
This gap is a “good way” to refuse to have “peace on earth and good will to all” by completely ignoring the “interrelated structure of reality” which Dr King spoke of. Dr King put it so well when he said “No individual can live alone; no nation can live alone, and as long as we try, the more we are going to have war in this world.” We now have a world which as Franklin D Roosevelt would have said is “ill housed, ill fed, and ill clothed.” To get to a solution as Dr King put it so aptly “Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe. our class, and our nation. . . we must develop a world perspective.” “Our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional.”
Each one of us “is somebody” and “a child of God” as Dr King told us. When we say “Thou shalt not kill” as he also said “we’re really saying that human life is too sacred to be taken on the battlefields of the world.” “One day” we must see as Dr King told us that “The Russians are our brothers.” And I’m sure today he would add that “the North Koreans and Iranians are our brothers.” and despite “our ideological and political differences” with them “one day we’re going to have to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.”
And as King added “When we truly believe in the sacredness” of all humanity “we won’t exploit people, we won’t trample over them with the iron feet of oppression, we won’t kill anybody.”
