This page was updated 11/20/2007

"Martin Luther King's Other Dream"

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s "other dream" was of a peaceful world and a peaceful America. As a black man in America, the first dream he had to dream was of a racially integrated America. Along the way he found a structure and a process that began to make that dream come true for himself and for millions of other Americans, first blacks and then other races. He discovered the way of non-violence preached by Gandhi, but before that he discovered an American Unitarian minister, Theodore Parker, whose life was a testament to the interconnection of peace and justice, of integration and morality. He wrote his doctoral thesis on Parker at Boston University, and he often paraphrased Parker in his sermons.

When he began to voice this other dream of peace, it was as controversial as his original dream of integration. Many people objected who had previously supported the civil rights struggle. He acknowledge this, and the reasons for it, in his famous and influential "coming out" at the conference at Riverside Church of Clergy and Laity Concerned over Vietnam. He goes on to say that he had to voice his opposition to the war, and earlier I read you part of his reasoning.

His opinions sound eerily contemporary with headlines about the American troop buildup in Iraq. There was an interesting cartoon in the paper showing a television with President Johnson’s face on it and President Bush’s words about sending more troops to Iraq. Increasingly, Iraq is becoming a second Vietnam, with the same tired strategies, the same tired clichés, and the same terrible combination of arrogance and ignorance. Apparently, we have learned little about ourselves or about our neighbors.

King connects war with race and poverty. His connection, though, is not some bland philosophical notion. The U. S. military in Vietnam was overpopulated with African-Americans in proportion to the U. S. census. Blacks received more wounds and fewer medals than whites. Now we see the same situation repeating itself in Iraq. The military again has a high proportion of non-whites to the population as a whole, and they bear the brunt of the war and its effects on their families.

Poverty is a great inducement to join the military, and for many people it is a step on the way to a better life. For many others, a great many others, it leads to horrific wounds, lasting mental nightmares, and the end of marriages and relationships. Our streets are still filled with men who came back from Vietnam but not back to their former lives. There were fewer after Gulf War I because it was short and involved few military personnel. We should expect to see more after Gulf War II, which has lasted now longer than our involvement in World War I or II (though not a war like them) -- more people than any of our "adventures" in Grenada, Panama, or Bosnia.

Blacks have seen their economic fortunes improve since the Sixties, yet there remains a lasting legacy of slavery and inequality in our inner cities and elsewhere that condemns many young blacks to life with no jobs and no prospects, except those offered by sports or crime –no real sense of participating in the national economy. So, crime wins out, and there are more blacks in American jails than ever before. In fact, more young black men are in jail than any other segment of our citizenry. We are "lucky" to have the military to absorb so many young men, and now young women, but at what cost? Surely the military is not our best instrument for ending poverty.

King notes that the promise of the War on Poverty was wiped out, obliterated, by the attention paid to our "other war" in Vietnam. We have the weakest "safety net" of social supports for our most disadvantaged fellow citizens of any great nation. We also have among the worst performing educational system of the industrialized, so-called "first world." By any standard, we have the most backward health care system among wealthy nations, in the number of people provided medical care and in life expectancy, yet ours is the most expensive medical care in the world.

King correctly points out that it is our adventurism, our short attention span and craving for entertainment, excitement, and adventure that takes our attention from the infrastructure needs of our nation and wastes our money and our young peoples’ lives in foreign wars. There is something rotten in the core of our national character, and it is tied to our need for a regular "fix" of violence, to which we are more addicted than any drug.

We now have a sound track for our adventures, provided by rap, hip hop, and other new forms of violence-drenched music. We have training academies for violence in our video and computer games. Our young people have abandoned education, and our science and reading levels continue to decline while other nations’ education level improves. In science we have become something of an embarrassment, and in math we are worse. Most young people entering middle school barely speak and write our language!

King is surely correct when he blames our declining national character on our fascination with adventures that detract us from the daily chores of national life and investment in the infrastructure of our cities, our schools, and our cultural life. We crave action and violence, not justice.

While looking over background material, I discovered that the First Gulf War started on King's birthday, which is enough grist for even the slowest preacher. For the 1991 King celebration at the beginning of Gulf War I, I also preached on King’s "other dream" of peace and non-violence. In that sermon, two breaking news stories diluted my topic. The first was a decided turn toward conservatism by the Gorbachev government in Russia, bringing threats of a return to the Cold War. The second event was more important. The Supreme Court struck down a ruling requiring busing to end segregation.

Racism in America evaded our best efforts to eradicate it in the late Fifties through the Seventies. Yes, the worst forms of racism are still rare in America, but the dismantling of the Justice Department's Civil Rights division under Reagan (continued under Bush I and all-but-completed under Bush II), the cynical and mean-spirited campaigns of the Religious Right, the misplaced furor over "quotas", and a continuing litany of corporate and social (though studiously not "personal") attacks on our best efforts at ending racism in this country are more than emphatic signs that racism still haunts America.

America has been conquered by petty, narrow-minded, and mean-spirited values advanced by shortsighted and greedy political and economic forces. The forces of conservatism, despite their polite words, their gestures of denial, and their pained expressions over the results of their policies, continue to wage war against the poorest and the weakest as they attack immigration policies, health care for all, and the safety net for our fellow citizens, including our veterans.

The greatest American black lawyer and jurist was still on the Court for the decision on busing; here is part of Mr. Justice Marshall’s dissent.

We started out to change the laws and to change the morality of racial segregation. Now we have learned sophisticated new ways to legally reinforce segregation. The Supreme Court decision that the University of Michigan broke laws by considering race in admitting students sadly pints out the racists’ success convincing Americans that past slavery leaves us no obligation to correct past injustices. It preaches the self-serving optimism that claims that all Americans are equal under the law because we say they are, regardless of experiences to the contrary. This is the modern face of racism.

Today I have no specific news to dilute King’s views, as I did fifteen years ago. I could use as an example the lamentable news from New Orleans: in the first eight days of the New Year nine people were murdered. New Orleans now has about the population of Fort Wayne. Violence in our society is so dominant a part of our culture that even small cities are scary places. Embarrassingly, we now tolerate in media and music the denigration of women and minorities, the urge to mindless violence and rape, and any form of excitement to take our minds off work, thought, and contemplation.

We are a nation of violent people and violent policies. We are not a nation of gods. We have in us all the human capacities for evil apparent in our enemies. Our vast technological apparatus and materialist comfort might suggest that we are overly endowed with the tools of self-delusion. King said,

Peace will come, in the Middle East, Darfur, or in our homes and neighborhoods, when -- and only when -- we admit that the task is difficult, that it requires structural changes in our lives and society (both politically and economically), and that it is a struggle with the forces of hatred, bigotry, and ignorance. Peace will only come when we listen to our enemies as well as our friends. Peace will only come when we respect folks of differing religions and cultures. Peace comes when we grow in wisdom rather than military might.

We could have avoided a war in the Middle East. But it was never possible in a climate of strutting machismo, empty rhetoric, and parochial vision, such as has characterized our national leadership for decades now. Racism is as much a cause of war as lines drawn in the sand and bullying words. Poverty is as much a cause of war as the invasion of a tiny country by a large military power. Peace is as much a matter of justice and reason as war is a result of bombs, armies, and strutting peacocks.

Peace is not the art of giving way before tyrants and other madmen. Peace is the art of constructing our lives and our civil and international institutions so as to nurture justice, health, education, and opportunity. Peace is a way of living, not simply a way of avoiding conflict. Peace is the religious way, the path we trod with others we respect and to whom we grant dignity the equal of our own. Pathways to peace have never begun in armaments production or in appeasement. They begin in the eradication of hatred and bigotry, in the establishments of social structures of equality and justice, in the provision for the care of the poor, weak, and oppressed among us. War will ever be the answer, foreign or domestic, until we are prepared to work as diligently for peace as we to prepare for war.

King noted the connections between the war in Vietnam and its effects on the soldiers, sailors, and marines involved. Since then, what we call "post-traumatic stress disorder" includes the effects of teaching young men and women peace at home and killing abroad. Further, King said, the war was destroying our national character, our faith in our nation and its heritage:

All this sounds suspiciously like it was written not for Vietnam but for Iraq II. Imagine the cynicism and distrust if we had gone back to Vietnam a decade after evacuating Saigon, but that is just what happened with the second Bush invasion of Iraq. Our troops are learning to distrust a government that has lied to them consistently about our purpose in Iraq.

Near the end of his speech to Clergy and Laity Concerned, King gave a warning similar to his famous "Letter from the Birmingham Jail."

The current push to increase our troops in Iraq is a wake-up call. In several ways over the years, King used to make this point: "It is no longer a question of war and peace, but it is a question of non-violence and non-existence." We no longer can rely upon military force, upon war as usual, as an instrument of national policy. Those days have passed for the world, as has the horse and buggy. Further violence shall not end the civil war in Iraq, nor will it end the cynicism in the minds of young Americans. The nation must turn from violence to non-violence, and the religious communities must lead us in this new direction.

Home