The Garment Of Destiny

... what people don’t realize is at the end of his life, King was looking at our crisis, a profound spiritual and material crisis, and he said that we had advanced economic growth at the expense of community and of participation, that our works had become larger and we ourselves had become smaller.
-- Grace Lee Boggs on Martin Luther King, Democracy Now!, January 22, 2008

I'm a white guy. I don't pretend to have that depth of insight into Martin Luther King that would allow me to speak with any authority about his legacy, and I'm a day late in any event. For most of his time in public life, I was attending an all-white school in Southern Ohio. The first time I sat in a classroom with a member of any minority, I was in college, barely two-and-a-half years before he was assassinated. At the time of his assassination, I was taking part in a college underground theater production, and we were all deeply affected, but still too ignorant, as I recall, of the full impact of what had occurred.

Even in the bubble environment of my high school and community, I had already had my encounters with these conflicts of values. As I began my freshman year, I took stock of my own hero worship for Frank Robinson of the Cincinnati Reds and Jim Brown of the Cleveland Browns. It was not lost on me that these were black men, and the strength of my identification with them in their athletic careers spilled over into my identification with their life struggles. I may have lived a sheltered youth, but I could not even then reconcile the still-pervasive attitudes of racism with the realities of the world at large.

If we could be transported now to those times in the late sixties, to April 4, 1968 when King was murdered, we would be overcome with the level of racism, not to mention the widespread jingoism, of that time. By today's standards, we were shockingly primitive. I bring some of that perspective to the table as I look at King's legacy today. Those of you still in your twenties, or even thirties, can't even imagine how far we've truly come, although many of us can see how far we have yet to go. I mention our progress in these areas not to provide an opportunity for self-congratulation, but to note that change does and will occur, for all the rhetorical flourishes of today, and that change will in the long run, God willing, not favor the regressive voices who still compete for dominance in our discussions. The long view of history points to greater understanding between all people, so there is hope.

I've listened to some of King's speeches the last couple of days. Sometimes I was a little irritated by the sing-song inflections of the old-time preacher in his delivery, and wished he would have spoken in more natural tones, but I understood the importance of the religious tradition for what he was and what he needed to accomplish. It's in keeping with the themes of this blog that I voice my appreciation for his faith as well. I've had conversations recently with my family, my aging father and stepmother, regarding topics like Creationism, and whether Barack Obama is really a Muslim. I understand how a changing world can seem like a threat to the simple faith that is the core of America's heartland. It's very important, then, that a man such as Martin Luther King, whose message resonates so deeply within the context of the kind of changes we need today, saw no conflict whatsoever with his fundamental Christian faith. Quite the contrary, his faith was his constant source of strength, and a tie that bound his cause to the "single garment of destiny" into which we are all interwoven.

The challenges of today may be, in some respects, a challenge of faith. While the influence of conservative fundamentalism may be seen by some as declining, I'm not as certain. Even in so-called progressive churches there is a tendency to resist confronting issues directly, and some tacit acceptance of injustices in exchange for a morally deficient stability. The deep grooves of well-travelled paths are still followed, even after they've sunk into ruts that mire us in place. In this atmosphere of failed leadership and looming storm clouds over the climate, the economy, and the misunderstandings between all people, men like Dr. King still have a destiny to reach battered hearts and minds when the need is greatest. Was I the only one to feel that his voice was louder this year, more insistent of its relevance to the issues of today? I strongly think not.

Not only his willingness to lead, but his simple unwavering faith, has made his memory especially powerful this year. He was the proof that we can celebrate, just as we are, that fabric of eternity that's beyond our separate selves, and gives life to what he called a "dangerous selflessness," in me, in you, in our best hopes for the safe harbor ahead in this storm-tossed sea. We have everything it takes, right here this minute, to succeed.

It shouldn't be surprising that Barack Obama would provide the most eloquent expression for this moment when we all have paused to reflect, although the things we've heard have been mostly far removed from such topics. I've been hard on all politicians for their unwillingness to stand firm against some of the worst abuses of the administration in the past year, but the potential of Obama has still tempted me to hope that he might be different. I still can't say, but Obama's speech at King's Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta last Sunday fulfilled all his promise as an inspiring speaker, and then some. The video below has been posted everywhere, and has probably been seen by millions already, but if you haven't heard this speech yet, you're in for quite a treat.

Is The Surge Working?

We waited breathlessly for General Petraeus' report, so we would know if The Surge was working. We'd been hearing about how well it was working from all the talking heads on tv, and we know Bush has been bragging about how we're "kicking a**". But there were whispers by those wuss Democrats that the White House might try to "cook the books" on The Surge figures. And then there's that pesky political progress thing, and all those benchmarks that weren't met.

But The Surge had worked, hadn't it? Wasn't violence down? Didn't we help the Sunnis beat back al-Qaeda in al-Anbar Province? Don't we have a Plan For Victory? General Petraeus is such a brilliant general, everyone says so, except for that terrible MoveOn.org. General Petraeus will tell us how it's all going to work.

Ok, enough of that. I was just trying to get into the head of the average dweeb, sitting down after a hard day's work to get a peek at the evening news. Actually, that was a fairly alert dweeb, wasn't it? Dweebs are hard to understand.

If you want to know the real story about The Surge, there's an excellent article at mediamatters.org called Myths and falsehoods about progress in Iraq. Of course, if you're of a conservative mindset, or maybe if you're a dweeb, you don't want to read some radical web site's opinions about the war. Actually, the article is a careful study of the information provided by General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker, alongside the array of independent studies like the GAO and NIE reports, and other scattered pieces of information that just happen to be factual. Some of the lesser known facts, for instance: all the success in al-Anbar Province was essentially pre-Surge, and due to a change in strategy in that area completely unrelated to The Surge; and violence is down this summer because violence in Iraq has been down every summer for the last four years -- and, by the way, there's more violence this summer than there was last year. Just read the article and come back here.

Now that we have that out of the way, let's think beyond The Surge. Let's talk about the thing that's so rarely discussed. That's the advantage of blogs like this, that we can talk about what we want to, and not what sells pharmaceuticals. I want to write a little more about War.

I've offered my feelings about War before, in a blog on August 17th of this year titled Masters of War. I wrote that when the din of war drums beating for a battle with Iran got so loud I had to say something. I got a lot off my chest in that blog, and I linked to some of the most hideously gruesome videos of war images I've ever seen, and I don't ever need to see those images again. I still hear the incessant Boom! Boom! Boom! of those Iran war drums, and I still worry a lot about those nukes they decided to fly over our heads last week, and you'd think I'd have gotten it all out of my system on August 17th, and there's nothing more to be said.

I just can't get over how we talk about things, especially on television. So many of us can sit down to a discussion looking for all the world like rational people, and talk about war as if it were little more than an overseas venture for a global corporation. If that's what you think, go look at those videos in my Masters of War blog, because you deserve them. The way the people on American television can talk about war is all I need to know about how sick and demented we really are.

I know there are dangerous people out there; you don't have to tell me. There's a guy out there I swear I would kill with my bare hands if I could, just so you know. There really are times when you have to fight, but Iraq? Iran? These are the corporate wars, the resource wars, and to some it's even an excuse to revive The Crusades, God help us! Those aren't even wars, except for the mountains of dead, of course. They're enterprises.

If the media actually did its job, they would make us look at the terrible images of war. Our hearts went out to the young boy who lost his arms, and his family, to American bombs during Shock and Awe. But the cameras moved on after wrenching our hearts with the images of that child, and those moments of raw truth were rarely seen. For the most part, this has been an incredibly antiseptic conflict as far as we know here at home, so we can listen to those idiotic talking heads without punching the set, because it's not reality.

Is The Surge working? Why should I care? Why do we continue to deny the deeper truths, the real Zen of our existence, with such inauthentic dialogue? I can feel the core of my humanity shriveling when I hear such discussions, and by the way, I can feel your humanity shriveling right along with mine.

There was another hero a few years back, who took a page from that impractical dreamer Gandhi. His name was Martin Luther King, and he had this to say about violence in general back in 1958:

In my weekly remarks as president of the resistance committee, I stressed that the use of violence in our struggle would be both impractical and immoral. To meet hate with retaliatory hate would do nothing but intensify the existence of evil in the universe. Hate begets hate, violence begets violence; toughness begets a greater toughness. We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love; we must meet physical force with soul force. Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man, but to win his friendship and understanding.

Gandhi and King both believed that the goodness of the human species would prevail over the evil part of its nature. That they were both murdered for that belief leaves one to ponder. But they led two of the most inspiring, successful movements of the twentieth century, so there must be something there. It can't work all the time; everyone knows that. When I see Osama bin Laden, I have a visceral reaction that would make Gandhi gasp in horror. Those situations are crystal clear: Osama bin Laden, Hitler, you fight these people. But when you don't have to fight -- when you have to think about it, should I fight this person? -- then you need Gandhi and King, because they told us about what we can be.

I'm not sure how much Gandhi-like, King-like, courage I see today, but I liked Barack Obama's speech today about Iraq. How many more surges will we have to endure before we actually adopt a policy to "meet the forces of hate with the power of love"? Barack Obama may be growing into an effective spokesman for this kind of thinking.

I know everyone isn't going to love us, and I'm not going to love everybody, but we see what happens when our answer to everything is The Surge. We've seen there are other approaches that can work, and actually make sense in many -- no, most(!) -- situations, and it would be, of all things, the Christian thing to do.

We can keep surging, until our young men and women are chewed up by wars in one way or another, until we've piled up so much debt to fund the war machine we have nothing left to give, and we've generated so much distrust and hatred that our enemies outnumber us twenty-to-one. Or we can wake up, and ask ourselves how we can have such conversations in cold blood. We can swear that we've bombed our last infant, and surged our last surge, unless we truly have no choice. We can reach out our hand, fearful, uncertain, into the abyss that men like Gandhi and King must have seen yawning before them as they made that leap of faith.