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King's 'dream' proves that the leader was a visionary
Commentary by Wendy Clarissa Geiger
The Martin Luther King Jr. holiday and the Iraq war inspired me, a 42-year-old white Southern Quaker woman, to write this.
White supremacist society seems to only allow King to be associated with a "dream." A dreamer is discounted as naïve, and out of touch with reality. We don't call George Washington a "dreamer." We call him a "visionary." But, this society discounts King by focusing on his "dream," and there's little in the mainstream press about his connecting nonviolence and militarism and war.
King wasn't killed for the dream he expressed in the 1963 March on Washington. He was killed for the vision for this country and Vietnam that he expressed April 4, 1967, and beyond. The establishment found his talk and actions too dangerous to the status quo. With King now safely dead, his anti-militarism and pro- nonviolence stance is ignored.
See the timelessness of his message by substituting "Iraq" for "Vietnam" in this excerpt from King's "Beyond Vietnam: A Time To Break Silence" speech given at New York's Riverside Church one year to the day before his assassination.
"I am as deeply concerned about our troops there as anything else.... [W]hat we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create a hell for the poor . . .
"I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken . . . The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours . . . The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways."
Pacifists are dismissed as naïve and idealistic. Yet, where nonviolence is tried, it often works. I look at militarists and think: They are naïve and idealistic to continue to try to solve problems with war and killing. As historian Theodore Roszack said, "People try nonviolence for a week, and when it 'doesn't work,' they go back to violence, which hasn't worked for centuries."
My favorite King quote is from "Why I Oppose the War in Vietnam," his April 16, 1967 sermon at Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church: "There's something strangely inconsistent about a nation and a press that will praise you when you say, 'Be nonviolent toward Jim
Clark [a sheriff who brutalized civil rights activists],' but will curse and damn you when you say, 'Be nonviolent toward little brown Vietnamese children.'"
Years ago, the late activist Ma Vynee Betsch, from American Beach, FL, listened to me rant about the inconsistency of ROTC units marching in the Martin Luther King Jr. parade, and military folk praising King. She said,"Oh, Wendy, let them have their heroes." What a lesson! Regarding King, the historian of the African American experience, Vincent Harding oft quotes a poet's words about Malcolm X: "He became much more than there was time for him to be."
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