America Must Not Be A Nation of Onlookers

This morning's inspiration came in the form of an email from my friend and kindred spirit in outrage in action, Ari Kohn of the Post-Prison Education Project. As the Washington State Legislature kicks off the next 115 days of work — work that will either increase or mitigate the misery of those who suffer the most during hard economic times — he has asked us to remember the lessons of history on the question of silence. Toward that end, he sent a link to the 1963 March on Washington speech of Rabbi Joachim Prinz. The rabbi, who was expelled from Germany in 1937 for speaking out against the Nazi threat, followed Odetta onto the stage to speak just prior to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's iconic "I Have A Dream" speech. While his words are not nearly so famed, the content is just as relevant to our times, if not more so. The link to a recording of the speech is here.

As Americans we share the profound concern of millions of people about the shame and disgrace of inequality and injustice which make a mockery of the great American idea.

“As Jews we bring to this great demonstration, in which thousands of us proudly participate, a two-fold experience -- one of the spirit and one of our history.

“In the realm of the spirit, our fathers taught us thousands of years ago that when God created man, he created him as everybody's neighbor. Neighbor is not a geographic term. It is a moral concept. It means our collective responsibility for the preservation of man's dignity and integrity.

“From our Jewish historic experience of three and a half thousand years we say:

“Our ancient history began with slavery and the yearning for freedom. During the Middle Ages my people lived for a thousand years in the ghettos of Europe . Our modern history begins with a proclamation of emancipation.

“It is for these reasons that it is not merely sympathy and compassion for the black people of America that motivates us. It is above all and beyond all such sympathies and emotions a sense of complete identification and solidarity born of our own painful historic experience.

“When I was the rabbi of the Jewish community in Berlin under the Hitler regime, I learned many things. The most important thing that I learned under those tragic circumstances was that bigotry and hatred are not '.the most urgent problem. The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful and the most tragic problem is silence.

“A great people which had created a great civilization had become a nation of silent onlookers. They remained silent in the face of hate, in the face of brutality and in the face of mass murder.

“America must not become a nation of onlookers. America must not remain silent. Not merely black America , but all of America . It must speak up and act,. from the President down to the humblest of us, and not for the sake of the Negro, not for the sake of the black community but for the sake of the image, the idea and the aspiration of America itself.

“Our children, yours and mine in every school across the land, each morning pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States and to the republic for which it stands. They, the children, speak fervently and innocently of this land as the land of "liberty and justice for all."

“The time, I believe, has come to work together - for it is not enough to hope together, and it is not enough to pray together, to work together that this children's oath, pronounced every morning from Maine to California, from North to South, may become. a glorious, unshakeable reality in a morally renewed and united America.”

On Power

A friend of mine sent me a quote on power by MLK yesterday after I played Mesmerized by Uncertainty and Revolution of Values for him in my car. I turned the highlights of King's Riverside speech into music and am now obsessed. I find them grounding.

Revolution of Values in particular, with its extended theme on the radical power of love, gets me misty nearly every time. In this speech, King nailed it, and its relevance to the contemporary moment is complete. My appreciation for King's ability to connect a political vision to the fullness of what it means to be human is constantly deepening. Here is King, in a 1967 address the the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, on the subject of power and it's relationship to love.

"Now power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose…And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites -- polar opposites -- so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love.

…we've got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love…It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our times."

I recognize a lot of Reinhold Niebuhr in this. Niebuhr's unsentimental views on human nature and power had an enormous influence on King. The strategic clarity of the civil rights movement derives substantially from Niebuhr's thinking on the centrality of self-interest to human experience and what this means in terms of the need for movement building.

Liberalism fatally assumes a base-line level of human decency that too often fails to materialize. This often includes a blindness to the power that self-interest plays in our own lives. This marriage of love and power that King discusses is the foundation of a grounded and transformational politics that can challenge the dehumanized ethics of a consumer society that defines us in terms of what we earn and own.

For Niebuhr, this grounding in a universal form of love was expressed in Christian terms, but the notion of a transcendent standard of love and community that rises above the limitations of time and tribe can be expressed in other ways as well. Love is bigger than religion. Love is all.

A True Revolution of Values

I went all Tracy Chapman on the last 11 minutes of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr's Riverside Speech last night. It's an amazing speech that remains utterly relevant and inspiring. Here's an article from the Village Voice archives that does a remarkable job of drawing the line from 1967 to now. Anyone who thinks the "giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism" are dead isn't paying any attention at all. If you're looking for a meaningful way to spend the next 11 minutes, have a listen while you read the Voice piece in a different window. Serious Apesma's Lament fans will recall this project began about a month ago, with Mesmerized by Uncertainty, which drew from the beginning of the speech.

Mesmerized By Uncertainty

Tonight I decided to celebrate the new strings on my guitar. This came together in a couple of hours. I made up a slinky sort of a blues groove, played a lead over it, and then somehow got inspired to add King's Riverside speech to the center of the mix. It worked better than I'd hoped. This might evolve into an epic, multi-song, sort of project. It's a long speech.

The Fierce Urgency of Now

Martin Luther King Jr's Riverside speech, also known as "Beyond Vietnam — A Time to Break Silence," remains utterly prophetic and relevant to the challenges that we face. Delivered on April 4, 1967, one year to the day before his assassination, this speech linked "the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism" to call for broad spiritual renewal and uncompromising honesty and reparation regarding the American empire. Honesty comes at a cost. His access to LBJ and much of his philanthropic support vanished with his shift to a deeper, more universal, radicalism, and much of the media turned on him as well.

The last section, where he speaks of the "revolution of values" that must take place from a "a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society," remains especially prescient. I carry this on my iPod and listen to it a few times a year. Each time, I find myself floored by his prophetic courage

It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin...we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and, through their misguided passions, urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations.

We must not engage in a negative anticommunism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity, and injustice, which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light. We in the West must support these revolutions.

It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch antirevolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has a revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores, and thereby speed the day when "every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain.

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.

This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind. This oft misunderstood, this oft misinterpreted concept, so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John: "Let us love one another, for love is God. And every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love." "If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us." Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day.

We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. And history is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says: "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word" (unquote).

We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood -- it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, "Too late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on."

We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a 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.

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message -- of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.

What's So Great About Violence?

Sunday night I read the first chapter of Peter Gelderloos' How Nonviolence Protects The State. Provocative title, huh? I thought so too. It's just out by South End Press, and I put in for my review copy the moment I got their postcard.

So far, my reaction is disappointment, amusement, and annoyance, but I'll try to keep an open mind. Perhaps chapter two, Nonviolence is Racist, will win me over.

The argument of chapter one, Nonviolence is Ineffective, rests on two prongs. The first is that the various wins generally associated with nonviolence — India's overthrow of colonialism, the civil rights movement, the non-nuclear proliferation movement, etcetera — weren't actually wins at all. They were all tactical capitulations to power that were spun as wins by the hegemonic victors.

Gelderloos dispenses with the civil rights movement, for example, in just four paragraphs.

The second is that nonviolence was not the only current within these examples, and whatever victories these movements did enjoy may be attributed to whatever more militant (read violent) tactics that may have been employed.

Writing this powerfully facile is best attempted by the very young. As near as I can tell, Gelderloos is about twenty-five. I found his affinity group photo from the Nov. 18, 2001 School of the America's action that put him in prison for six months, and he was 19 then. Since then he's shaved his head and become an anarchist. He's started the Signalfire site, and has developed an impressive activist resume.

His SOA stint led him to prison organizing, and for that alone I am grateful, since the attrocity of America's prisons seem to exist in some sort of magical twilight realm of which liberals everywhere are blithely unaware.

Yet, his book thus far just pisses me off. He moves way too fast from the position that working for change without building for power is useless to the notion that more violence is just the thing our movement needs.

Put simply, unless a movement is a threat, it cannot change a system based on centralized coercion and violence, and if that movement does not realize and exercize the power that makes it a threat, it cannot destroy such a system. ... The elite cannot be persuaded by appeals to their conscience.

So far so good. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. would agree. But his evidence for the ineffectiveness of nonviolence and the salubriousness of its opposite, at least in the first chapter, is weak.

He makes the mistake of thinking in binaries, which causes him to dismiss King as an ineffective sellout and to embrace the Weathermen as bold revolutionary tacticians. He also makes the elementary mistake of confusing nonviolence with the absence of militance. Nobody who is familiar with, for example, the history of the Freedom Riders would make such a claim.

At some point (I'm thinking French Resistance here) we may have no choice but to form underground cells and fight fascism with violence. But we're a long way from that moment. At present, the state has the monopoly on the legitimate use of force, and, as we saw here during WTO, violent tactics from a small romantic cult on the extreme left mostly just provide legitimation for the deployment of state violence against us all.

So let's not get ahead of ourselves, OK?

Gone to Church

The incomparable Dr. Wes Browning shot this with the cheapest video camera in the world last month during the unveiling ceremony for the new King County logo. The ceremony at Mount Zion Baptist Church featured musical tributes by DaNell Daymon & Royalty.

On February 24, 1986, the King County Council passed Council Motion 6461, "setting forth the historical basis for the renaming' of King County in honor of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. King County was originally named by the Oregon Territorial Legislature in 1852 after Vice President William Rufus Devane King, a slave owner from Alabama who died of tuberculosis the next year.

Because only the state can charter counties, this change was not made official until April 19, 2005, when Washington Governor Christine Gregoire signed Senate Bill 5332 into law. The County Council voted on February 27, 2006 to change the county's logo from a royal crown to an image of King's face. On March 12, 2007, the new logo was unveiled.