Which Dr. King Will We Honor?

Monday 18 January 2010
by: Ryan Van Lenning, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed


As we observe the life and example of Martin Luther King, Jr., the question arises, "Which Dr. King will we honor?"

Will we yet again observe a polished, scaled-down, and non-threatening version of Martin Luther King, Jr. - the mere shadow of the man and his dream? At least we will recognize the leadership of the man who called for racial equality and urged us to be of service to our neighbors - as we should. We will even recognize that "we have come a long way" and "there is still further work to do" - as we should. Yet the further work to be done is invoked almost as an absolution, affirming our commitment to the dream, but without further specification and without discussing our troubling, ongoing racial inequalities.

Gone will be the King who called for an end to militarism and far-flung imperial wars, the King who said, "I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such," and who called his government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."

The fact that our militarism has only grown significantly in the intervening decades makes it more comfortable to sweep these aspects of King's message under the national rug. With Obama mobilizing more soldiers and military contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan than Bush did, authorizing more drone attacks that have killed more innocent civilians than Bush did, expanding military bases in South America, and requesting and receiving the largest military budget ever in the history of not only this nation, but any nation in history, it is easier to simply close our collective lips about this King.

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