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Recordando a Martin Luther King, Jr.
Tu voz profunda aún flota en el aire que arde,
Fundiendo el silencio cobarde.
Tú estás de pie sólido y con paciencia
Mirando cara a cara la violencia.
Tú eres el que ha soñado
Que esta nación su credo ha honrado.
Tú eres el que marcha gallardo.
Tú eres quien su sangre ha derramado.
No eres uno sino muchos
Reacios a agacharse o arrastrarse.
Tú eres el que no aceptará nada menos
Que un mundo justo para todos.
“Somehow this madness must cease.”
–Martin Luther King, Jr.
Somehow, like a small stunned bird
cupped in your hands with its heart racing,
is a word of hope or desperation,
carrying a moral burden, a Sisyphean burden,
to do whatever is possible, before
it is too late.
Might we not somehow awaken,
open our eyes, stand up in the face of madness
and, even with trembling legs
and a fluttering heart, comfort
the small bird until it can spread its wings
and fly away?
It is a delicate task to set aside
the blanket of complacency, to somehow,
as he did, clutch courage to your breast.
David Krieger
March 2011
The lives of our two honorees, like the lives of so many other individuals in this country and throughout the world, have been deeply affected by war.
Reverend James Lawson was a conscientious objector during the Korean War, for which he spent time in prison. It helped mold his life as a leader in peace and nonviolence, and then as a mentor to Martin Luther King, Jr.
Professor Glenn Paige served as an enlisted man and officer in the Korean War and then wrote a book justifying the war. Later, he would criticize his own book and conclude there was no justification for killing in that war or any war.
For both men, the experience of war changed the course of their lives and put them on the path of peace.
One of the great myths of our time is that war creates peace. It does not. War breeds war, laying the groundwork for future wars. As Martin Luther King, Jr. observed, “Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows…. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means.” As our 2007 honorees – Peter, Paul and Mary – asked in song, “When will we ever learn?”
War kills not only with bullets and bombs. It also kills indirectly by robbing the world’s people of the resources necessary for survival. As President Eisenhower emphasized in his Farewell Address, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
The world is spending more than $1.5 trillion annually on war and its preparation. While it does so, the United Nations struggles to raise the needed resources to meet its eight Millennium Development Goals: to eradicate poverty and hunger; achieve universal primary education; promote gender equality and empower women; reduce child mortality; improve maternal health; combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; ensure environmental sustainability; and build a global partnership for development.
For only five to 10 percent of global military expenditures annually for the next five years, the world could reach the markers that have been set for these Millennium Development Goals by the year 2015. Instead, we choose to use our scientific and financial resources to build and deploy ever more powerful weapons. It is a soul-deadening exercise.
War and violence are the enemies of humanity. There is a better way forward as shown in the lives of our honorees, based on nonviolence and nonkilling.
At the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, we believe that nuclear weapons have made peace an imperative of the Nuclear Age. We must eliminate these weapons, which threaten civilization and the human future, and we must also eliminate war. That is the work of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, and we need all of you to join with us to achieve our goals.
Let me give you a few relevant statistics about the Foundation. Our membership is over 37,000 people. More than 30,000 individuals participate in our Action Alert Network, sending messages to elected representatives.
Our Peace Leadership Program Director, Paul Chappell, has given over 100 talks or workshops in the past year to high schools, universities, churches, activist organizations, and veterans groups throughout the country. There are over 2,100 people now in our Peace Leadership Program.
Some 700,000 people have visited our WagingPeace.org and NuclearFiles.org websites in the past year. Our Sunflower e-newsletter is distributed to tens of thousands of people worldwide.
We are intent upon breaking down the walls of ignorance, apathy and complacency that surround issues of nuclear weapons and war, and replacing them with new and abundant energy and commitment directed toward peace and human survival. This is the responsibility to future generations demanded of those of us alive on our planet today.
With six hard-working and talented staff members and dozens of volunteers, including our dedicated Board, our distinguished Advisors and Associates and our enthusiastic and competent college interns, we are committed to building a safer and saner world. We educate and advocate to abolish nuclear weapons, strengthen international law, and empower new generations of peace leaders.
Let me conclude with three short quotations from three giants of the 20th century.
Albert Camus, an existential philosopher and Nobel Laureate in Literature, said, “I have always held that, if he who bases his hopes on human nature is a fool, he who gives up in the face of circumstances is a coward. And henceforth, the only honorable course will be to stake everything on a formidable gamble: that words are more powerful than munitions.”
Albert Einstein, the great scientist and humanist who changed our understanding of the universe, said, “The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.”
Eleanor Roosevelt, who was the driving force behind the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, said, “The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”
It is in the creative tension between words and actions that we must seek to fulfill our dreams. May we never lose hold of the dream of peace. May we choose hope and find a way to change the world. May we each do our part to pass the world on intact to future generations.
Dorothy and I are pleased and delighted to be here for this occasion. And on behalf of our families and ancestral families, on behalf of our sons and grandchildren, on behalf of the struggle of people everywhere for that other world that is possible, that other society that is possible, we accept with deep appreciation this award from the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. I am profoundly moved this evening for this opportunity, and in so many different ways you have encouraged my own spirit. The things that we’ve heard this evening are just wonderful, marvelous. The way in which this Foundation and David Krieger and the Board have sought to push the matter of peace, the end of war, the end of nuclear weapons, is for me a great shot of encouragement and adrenaline to keep on keeping on.
I have friends in this audience and I’m delighted to see them, as well. To walk in and see Stanley Sheinbaum here, one of my own personal heroes, a man with whom I’ve been related in a great variety of ways over the last 35 or 40 years, and who remains a stalwart figure in the tradition of what Joshua Heschel spoke of as God’s pathos, God’s passion. He is a wonderful illustration of that.
I looked over the invitation for this evening fairly carefully at home for several days. I noticed you have Glenn Paige and me joining a distinguished group of people, and I want to express my own humility to be on this list of people. I appreciate all that Glenn Paige has done, he belongs in that category, and his “nonkilling” notion, politics, are a tremendous idea, an idea whose time has come, and I want to especially applaud that we can have another kind of society.
I decided, in fact, I wanted to address quite briefly from the perspective of one on your Advisory Council, Harrison Ford, who is, in addition to his fame and celebrity and acting, an environmentalist who has worked in many different parts of the world as well as in the United States. This past January, I was taking a trip somewhere on Southwest Airlines. As I often do, I picked up their monthly magazine called The Spirit, and in that issue, January’s issue, there was this conversation between Bill Ford, of the Ford Company, and Harrison Ford—a conversation around the issues of the environmental movement and struggle. They have both participated in this cause around the world and know each other from that participation. It’s a very interesting piece, but towards the end of the piece, Harrison Ford, after talking with Bill Ford about environmental issues and the movement and the struggle, said something like this, and I’m not going to quote it exactly, but I’m going to give you the gist of what he said. He said what he sees now, after the years he’s given to it, is the failure of the environmental movement. He suggested something that I think is a point of strategy that has interested me ever since. He said the movement has failed because we have worked over the years from issue to issue and from species to species. That made a vivid picture in my mind, as I followed that movement across these decades. Then he said, concluding his critique of his own work and of a great movement, that what we need is a movement like the civil rights movement of a few years ago. So that’s going to frame the structure of what I’m going to say this evening.
In many ways, we who are the advocates of peace, we who want peace, have obviously failed in our own country and in the world. One could say this about the civil rights movement. One could say this about the anti-poverty movement. One could say this about the living-wage movement of which I’ve been a part for some now 25 years. I suspect many of the critical issues that you and I have worked for, and believe in, and imagine, have over the last 30 years, maybe more, simply not taken off in the mind of the people, the mind of the nation. We know our work remains in many different ways and forms. We can’t afford to have the peace movement fail. And in the first instance, across these last 30 years, we 300 million, plus a few, of this land are now participants in this nation that—as David has said here, which I have rarely heard anyone say—because of its military power and its financial power, has become, as Martin King said, the genitor of violence around the world. I’ve said it like this in the past: We in the United States have intentionally or unintentionally become the number one enemy of peace and justice in the world today. We’ve become the number one military, bar none, today or in the past, with 800 military installations in 130 countries, with naval fleets and with air fleets, and with military people on the ground, with massive technology, even with nuclear weapons for our use.
The nation has become a military security nation in many different ways, whether we have liked it or not, or whether we ourselves are or have been victims of it. But a major way in which we’ve failed is that we’re in a society now where there’s tremendous confusion and animosity, a lack of civil conversation and discussion, the unwillingness to put on the table the issues that we feel deeply about and the issues that are hurting and paining millions of our fellow citizens around the country. In all complexions and in all parts of the country, our own visions for our own land are being smashed steadily by a media that talks and talks and talks and talks, but very rarely about real human beings, very rarely about our country, very rarely about this magnificent 300 million people that we represent. On almost every issue in the present electoral scheme, there is little common sense being put on the table. There is very little wisdom from our own past as a nation, and the wisdom of the human race is nowhere to be found to any extent in most of the elections and the campaigns. And I’m sure there are a few instances where that’s not the case, but in most of the ones we hear about and read about, that wisdom from our own ancestry of the human race is simply not there.
Take this matter of nuclear weapons. This issue is a very personal issue with me. In August 1945, I was preparing for my senior year in high school in Massillon, Ohio, when the bomb was dropped on the 6th on Hiroshima, and then on Nagasaki on August 9th. For quite a number of years now I’ve tried to observe those two days in some ways of contemplation and peace. Within a few days after the 9th of August, the National Forensic League of the country sent out urgent letters to high schools across the country, saying the topic that had been designated for 1945-46 had been changed. It would now be “Does the atomic bomb make mass armies obsolete?”
So for the next nine months, my colleagues and I at Washington High School studied and explored and read about this question about which there was very little written. It was three months after that topic was chosen that the director of the Manhattan Project wrote a book called The Manhattan Project. No one knew very much about this at all. So, I learned in my reading that the soldiers of World War II in 1945 went into Japan to occupy Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They were told that the radiation was beneath the levels that would affect them. And when they began to report their sickness, they were told that whatever it was was not connected to the bomb. It took 30 years before the Army and the Navy and the U.S. Government admitted that the impact of those weapons upon those men had indeed produced the things the men and their wives and their families were reporting across the decades.
The weapons must be abolished. Not just nuclear weapons, but also every form of mass destruction weapons must be abolished.
I ask us the question, “What kind of people are we that we do not rise up with indignation?” That our own land, in spite of the lofty ideals and history that is extraordinary, will be using its energy and resources, as it has been said already this evening, for trying to get the human race to commit suicide, trying to reduce and discontinue this extraordinary species of life that you and I and billions of others represent.
I want to go to the second point here, namely, that we have not persuaded the American people that there is a quality of life that they’re missing, and that the leadership of many different governmental levels is refusing to allow us to have or to reach.
And that comes then to the concluding point that I wanted to make, namely, that in all the good work we are doing, somehow, we must help to ignite the non-violent struggle in the 21st century in our country, in the United States, that will help us on the one side not only to continue to dismantle those elements of our history and of our life today that we know are wrong, unjustified, impractical. At the same moment then, we lift up the highest values that we can achieve, namely equality, liberty and justice for every boy and every man and every girl and every woman in every part of our land, access to life, access to the opportunity for life, access to make themselves what God decrees their life is about, access to the resources that we have in the 21st century that can make life, human life, beyond our imagination, even maybe beyond the graphs of past history and the like.
For a non-violent struggle, what we do must sow the seeds. Nonkilling is critically important. I like Professor Paige’s use of the words “a science of non-killing.” I love it.
May I suggest to you the things about Gandhi and non-violence that are critical? Because Gandhi again and again insisted, “I am experimenting with, I am offering the evidence and the facts and the history of, a science of non-violence that allows human beings to create the sort of nation, and world, and community that they want. Non-violence is a science of social change. I will not say much beyond that, but I do want to insist upon this, something that Glenn has said, and also that David has said, namely: “Why is it that we are not at the place where we’d hope to be in this 21st century, where many of our ancestors wished us to be?” Part of the reality is that we have deceived ourselves, not only with these myths of violence and killing and nuclear deterrence. But most of all, we think that human life allows us to take a short cut, that we can create good out of wrong or evil, that we can create human affections that will hold us together in unity out of thinking and practicing the very opposite of human affections, namely hatred and despising or, very specifically, in some of our own systems, out of racism, sexism, violence, and economic greed, all of which denigrate human beings of infinite worth in the journey of life.
There’s a beautiful story, in the 19th chapter of the Book of Luke in the Christian Bible, of Jesus looking down across Jerusalem and weeping and saying, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, would that even today you knew the things that make for peace, but they are hidden from your eyes.” We today in our country, our leadership, our Pentagon, and the rest, do not know the things that make for peace. As A.J. Muste said at one point, “Peace is the way to peace,” the things that make for peace. We have great need for socio-political and economic change in the United States. Somehow we must persuade ourselves that the arena of social change, the arena of hope for the nations, is not in the troubled places around the world where we have our hands and our resources, but in Santa Barbara, in Chicago, in Waycross, Georgia, in Florida—here in our own country. The movement of which I was a part—which represents for me, indeed, an exhilarating time of life—did make the impact because King and Rosa Parks and Fanny Lou Hamer, and a whole host of people whose names are long forgotten, were convinced, like Gandhi, that, in a very real way, you cannot resist indignities in life with new indignities. Gandhi in South Africa invented the term “non-violence” for the first time, around 1906 or 1908. The reason he invented this was because he was organizing Muslims and Hindus for resisting the very racist and colonialist sort of laws that were being imposed upon his fellow countrymen in South Africa. He said, after great conversations and great contemplation, “I cannot resist this; I cannot move to change this by imitating it; I cannot challenge the government with the government’s theory and the government’s practice, that will only compound our difficulty.” It was there in that cauldron that he coined the term “non-violence” not as a negative, but as he says in his own writings, a positive. That love, the paramount force of life and of the universe, must be the context by which we resist the wrong that we feel and know. The reason that the Movement had the energy it did in those days was because we sought to insist that what we human beings are about anyway are not the things that are the agenda of the powers. They were about our families, sustaining love, encouraging life, healing love. We’re about the business of organizing our neighborhoods, our congregations, our schools, hoping to nurture life, not destroy it. The agenda of others who want power and domination are not where we see ourselves, and Gandhi insisted that the vast multitude of people of India and around the world were of the same mind.
Harrison Ford was right. The movement for which in part you celebrate my life and work this evening was a 20-year period of intensive strategizing and action and work of civil disobedience and, yes, of martyrdom for some, of injury for others; a 20-year period when, in each of those years from 1953-1973, there were literally thousands of actions across the country to make a difference, in which the people, millions of us, all around the country, worked on the new agenda, such as “Head Start,” worked in a legislative way while people were in jail and marching. We worked to pull the signs down in California, as well as in Tennessee. And we did this out of a sense that we could have another kind of society, somehow in our time and in our day.
I accept this award with a personal sense that I will continue to work on it. Somehow in our day we must convince ourselves we can have another world, we can have another nation. There is a more powerful vision that cannot only hold us in a way, but will allow us in the United States to find the burst of freedom and equality and liberty that will shock our imaginations, and will help us to see that we can be and will be the people history designates us to be in the 21st century.
Thank you very much.
At the Foundation’s 27th Annual Evening for Peace on October 29, 2010, we will honor two outstanding individuals who have made significant contributions to building a more peaceful world.
Reverend James Lawson, a proponent of Gandhian nonviolence, was a mentor in nonviolence to Martin Luther King, Jr. When Reverend Lawson speaks of nonviolence, he speaks authoritatively of his experience in one of the most important nonviolent movements of the 20th century, the U.S. civil rights movement.
Professor Glenn Paige is the author of Nonkilling Global Political Science and founder of the Center for Global Nonkilling. He is pioneering in working for a nonkilling world, seeking to make the killing of other human beings a taboo.
The lives of our two honorees, like the lives of so many other individuals, have been affected by war. Reverend Lawson was a conscientious objector during the Korean War, for which he spent time in prison. Professor Paige served as an enlisted man and officer in the Korean War and then wrote a book justifying the war. Later, he would criticize his own book and conclude there was neither justification for killing in that war nor any war. For both men, the experience of war changed the course of their lives and put them on the path of peace.
War not only kills with bullets and bombs. It also kills indirectly by robbing the world’s people of the resources for survival. As President Eisenhower emphasized in his Farewell Address, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
The world is spending more than $1.5 trillion annually on war and its preparation. While it does so, the United Nations struggles to raise the resources to meet its Millennium Development Goals to eradicate poverty and hunger; achieve universal primary education; promote gender equality and empower women; reduce child mortality; improve maternal health; combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; ensure environmental sustainability; and build a global partnership for development.
War and violence are the enemies of humanity. There is a better way forward as shown in the lives of our honorees, nonviolence and nonkilling. Nuclear weapons have made peace an imperative of the Nuclear Age. We must eliminate these weapons, which threaten civilization and the human future, and we must also eliminate war. That is the work of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. The support of individuals like you allows us to work each day for a more peaceful and decent world, free of nuclear threat.
In a lecture in late 1967 over the Canadian Broadcasting Company, Martin Luther King, Jr. addressed the subject of “Conscience and the Vietnam War.” His conscience was clearly telling him that this was a war that made no sense and must be stopped.
“Somehow this madness must cease,” King said. “We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative of this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours.”
King went on to say in his speech, “The war is Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit.” Within a few months, that malady would result in King’s assassination, and over the years since King’s death that malady would lead America into other wars in other places.
Today, King’s words could be transposed from Vietnam to Iraq: “I speak as a child of God and a brother to the suffering poor of Iraq….” And it is still the “poor of America” who are paying the greatest price, the ultimate price on the battlefield and the loss of hope at home, while corporations such as Halliburton reap obscene profits.
Over the decades the “malady within the American spirit” that King named persists. It is a malady of power, arrogance and greed, a malady that takes our high ideals and smashes them in the dust, along with human life, by bombs dropped from 30,000 feet. With the power to wage war, our leaders have again thumbed their noses at the international community and sent our young soldiers to fight and die in an illegal war, authorized neither constitutionally nor under international law.
King concluded his speech by saying, “We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and for justice throughout the developing world that borders on our doors. 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.”
The world warned the US against going to war in Iraq. The UN Security Council refused to be forced into war or to authorize it, and the US president called the UN irrelevant. Millions of people throughout the world took to the streets, and the US Administration dismissed them as irrelevant.
Today, the US Administration has had its way, and the terrible scourge of war has again been unleashed. Thousands have died, including more than 500 American soldiers. Tens of thousands have been injured and maimed, including thousands of American soldiers. Saddam Hussein has been pulled from power and his statues toppled, but Iraq is in chaos as a result of the US invasion and occupation, and experts are predicting that a terrible civil war lies ahead. No weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, although the US president assured us they were there, and American soldiers are being confronted daily by bullets, bombs and scorn.
What would King say to us today? Would he be resilient, or would he be broken by the “shameful corridors” through which our leaders have dragged us? Surely, he would be resilient. He knew the pain of struggle and he knew that war and violence only breed more war and violence. But how his heart would ache for the lost promise of those destroyed by this war and for the poor who bear the burden most. How his heart would ache if he could see how little we have progressed in overcoming the maladies of power, arrogance and greed. Surely, King’s message would be constant, and he would be leading a nonviolent struggle today to find the way to peace and respect for human dignity in America, Iraq and throughout the world.
*David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. He is the co-author of Choose Hope: Your Role in Waging Peace in the Nuclear Age and Peace: 100 Ideas.
Martin Luther King, Jr. would have been 75 years old today had he lived to grow older. At 75, he certainly would have been a wise man. He was already wise well beyond his years at 39 when he was assassinated. How valuable it would have been for our country and the world to have had him here to speak and take action on the issues of the day.
Above all else, Dr. King was a man of justice and peace. One can imagine how, were he able to see us today, he would have recoiled at the increasing gap between rich and poor in our country and the world; at the tax cuts for the rich and the deceptions by political leaders to achieve them; at the abuses of corporate leaders who cheated both their shareholders and their employees; and, most of all, at the lies of political leaders to take the country to war yet again.
He certainly would have remembered the Vietnam War that he spoke out against so eloquently, and he would have been struck by the similarities between that war and the war in Iraq. He would have been deeply saddened to see that America had built its military on the backs of the poor, and that US soldiers were still coming home in body bags.
Dr. King’s 75th birthday is a time for reflection about who we are as a people and who we want to be. It is a time to strengthen our resolve to work, as he did, for justice, peace and human dignity. It is a time to strengthen our resolve to create a just and decent country that upholds civil and human rights for all. It is a time to recognize our responsibilities to lead by example, not by force. It is a time to work to end the double standards of “do as I say, not as I do” policies that shame our country and tarnish it in the eyes of the world.
What would he have said about our Congress giving away its Constitutional authority to make war to the President? What would he have said about the President leading the country to war against Iraq illegally and without the approval of the United Nations Security Council?
What would he have said about our continued reliance on nuclear weapons long after the end of the Cold War, and our plans to conduct research on mini-nukes and “bunker-busting” nuclear weapons? What would he have said about the allocation of nearly half of our discretionary income as a society to prepare for and engage in war? What would he have said about our lack of universal health care, the breakdown of our educational system and the growing number of homeless in the streets?
Dr. King is not here to speak out and take action, but I can imagine that he would have been angered and deeply saddened by the state of our country and the world. He likely would have been disgusted by the poor quality of leadership and the continued prevalence of greed in our nation. He would have wanted us to do more and give more of ourselves. He would have called upon us to strengthen our efforts to build a peaceful and just world. Although he is not here to inspire us, that should not stop us from hearing the echoes of his deep, resonant voice. Although he is not here to lead, that should not stop us from acting.
The best birthday present we could give to Martin Luther King, Jr. is our commitment to his dream the dream of a more just and decent America, a country that could lead in justice and decency rather than military expenditures and number of billionaires. Remembering him helps us to realize how far we have strayed from our course and far we have to go.
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*David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. He is the co-author of Choose Hope: Your Role in Waging Peace in the Nuclear Age and Peace: 100 Ideas. For more information on Martin Luther King’s 75th birthday click here.