A year ago, I had just returned from Memphis where the National Conference for Media Reform had convened. The timing and location of the NCMR gatherings has always been well considered. I rushed back in the wee small hours of the morning to be among friends at the annual i. c. stars gathering, marking the day we honor the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Memphis the location of the “Mountaintop” speech and where assassins bullets made a great man a martyr the following day.)
Dr. King shall always hold a place of honor in the American Pantheon. Democracy Now has done great service today in honoring his memory by playing parts of several speeches.
I was especially struck by the importance of history, and the idea that the thugs that enforce order do not know history and while they might know physics, they do not know trans-physics. Human History is more than an unfolding of physics. Physics (here) is force, and those who govern with only guns, batons, and dogs, and water-cannons and fear and threat and not with understanding of history and appreciation of social progress (and the potential to slip) are but shallow “leaders”.
Dr. King’s lessons are important for us today, not just as record of where the nation has come from, but how far we still have to go.
The “Beyond Vietnam” speech, offered a year to the day before his murder forces a reflection on our nation’s presence on the world stage. Dr. King’s message was evolving. Social and economic justice are deeply entwined.
Having grown up post-Dr. King, after the many victories of the civil rights movement, I often reflected upon the meaning of injustice in the present day. Surely racism and other categories of injustice still exist, and we live with the effects of prior unjust policies, but when injustice no longer has sanction of government the strategy for addressing it must change. The injustice of person over person along categorical lines sanctioned by the state seems fairly distant from our (my) day-to-day life. It doesn’t mean it isn’t occurring. Indeed, on the world stage we are deeply enmeshed in this sort of thing, we’re just fairly insulated from most of it.
Here we are in 2008. What is injustice today?
How we choose to live together, how we conduct ourselves in our homes and neighborhoods, and our nation’s conduct upon the world stage, these demand reflection.
Are we on the right side of history? How can we know unless we know history? Our methods demonstrate we are not on the right side of history. We accept the necessity of force, the exigency of torture; we suspend due process.
If we justify these methods out of fear of failure, we have failed. We as a people will be so much stronger if we stand by our principles.
Dr. King concluded his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” with an indictment of the lovers of order over justice. The stumbling block and frustrating impediment to human social progress is the
moderate, more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is an absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice…
Dr. King’s wisdom is grounded in the ecology of community. There is an ecology to the history of peoples and nations, an ecology of human knowledge and right conduct, and a general ecology of human practices on this Earth. Our economic and social bonds, the practices by which we perpetuate an unsavory and unhealthy order must give way. We can choose health, but it must be an active choice.