Liberal MLK, Jr. and the business of war protest

The only time I got to within a couple of feet of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was in a crispy February 1968 morning in Washington, D. C., when I joined a group of clergy and lay people concerned about Vietnam march to Arlington Cemetery to protest the war as well as remind the nation that the war against poverty in the nation was faltering.

In March that year, he would launch a Poor People’s March inviting everyone from across the nation to converge in the Capital City for a massive demonstration for the poverty program and against the war in Vietnam.

April 4 that previous year, Dr. King delivered “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence” in an address to the Clergy and Lay group at the famed Riverside Church in the New York City. He concluded with the organizers that silence about the war constituted betrayal. President Johnson earlier launched his War on Poverty program to give teeth to Civil Rights legislation. On that, Dr. King commented: “Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war. 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.” He added, “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today–my own government.”

A year to the day of that speech, and after delivering an ominous, meditative “I’ve been to the Mountaintop” the night before in Memphis, Tennessee, Dr. King’s voice would be stilled by an assassin’s bullet. The anti-war protest would confront the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago that summer, and the nation would again be polarized on its stance on war as an instrument of American public policy.

That polarization, now media-titled ‘Red vs. Blue’ after the 2004 Presidential election, is shaping up at G.W. Bush’s “A Vision of America” Inauguration Day Jan. 20, 2005. Bush commemorates 200 years of American exploration (Lewis and Clark), and 100 years of natural conservation (Theodore Roosevelt). The consent of the governed has an unapologetic Christian Religious Right flavor. The dissent of the governed is a heterogeneous coalition of anarchic libertarians, reinvigorated liberals, and emergent radicals. The War in Iraq throbs loudly on the pulse of the nation. Dr. King’s “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government” remains a clear and defensible perspective.

I read with great empathy the comments of Pfc. Adrian Lizama on his brief visit over the holidays from his current deployment in Iraq. “We’re fighting for their freedom and trying to win their hearts and minds,” the 19-year-old from San Vicente said.

Newsweek magazine, presenting a “Perspective on the War” in its New Year’s issue, quotes a 22-year old 2nd Lt. Leonard Cowherd’s last letter to his wife: “Some of these guys out here, Sarah, they are just kids. If you saw them walking down the street, you would think they belong in the arcade at a movie theatre, hanging out with their friends, getting in trouble, doing full stuff kids do—not putting their lives on the line, every second of every day.” He died in May. Current count on American casualties since G.W. Bush declared the war over has gone beyond 1,300 red-white-and-blue draped coffins.

Even North Carolina Republican Rep. Howard Coble, head of the House Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security, declared Jan. 8 that “it’s time for the U.S. to consider withdrawing.” Brent Scowcroft, National Security Adviser during G.H. Bush’s presidency, stated Jan. 6 that the situation in Iraq now raised the “fundamental question of whether we should get out now.” Former Carter National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, echoed the sentiment in stronger terms: “I do not think we can stay in Iraq in the fashion we’re in now. If it cannot be changed drastically, it should be terminated.”

Four years ago, G.W. Bush spent $40 million dollars to get sworn-in. This year, it will cost more. Marie Antoinette’s comment over 200 years ago, “Let them eat cake,” to the poor and destitute of France, resonates loudly as the nation faces health, education and welfare issues. Sixteen Congressional Democratic Party partisans against G.W. Bush are circulating a letter demanding for an immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq. The nation remains polarized down the middle.

I am reminded of that fateful year of 1968, when the anti-war forces were decimated by the landslide election of Richard M. Nixon. A young Democrat named William Clinton would pick up some political skills in Dallas, Texas where I was going to school. With two term papers due to complete a Master’s Degree, I decided to drop out of the University in an act of ultimate personal protest.

That year, I followed my bride to her small, reluctantly integrated Methodist College in Greensboro, North Carolina where she was finishing a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology. The following year, with Nixon’s inauguration, I would end up driving student volunteers to do tutorials for students in a former cotton mill factory neighborhood. My wife would teach Head Start. We both attended many gatherings where the Beattles’ “Give Peace a Chance” and the gospel song “We Shall Overcome” were prominently vocalized.

For a living, I naively took on the education and youth program of a white, suburban United Methodist Church, where two of the members decided to call me Mr. Jones, refusing to learn my name. It did not help that I had a black-and-white poster of MLK, Jr. on my office wall, and that members complained after I played Dr. King’s “I have a Dream” speech to the youth group. Of course, I also did not know that the town was host to the Grand Wizard of the Klu Klux Klan, who along with American Nazi Party, would massacre street demonstrators 10 years later.

Dr. King’s legacy of the struggle for the right to self-determination and the right to sovereignty of the most oppressed peoples around the world would shape a score and half of my life. A church member in Greensboro revealed her shock when she realized, she said, that I was a “liberal.” A variation of that was echoed after I revealed in this column that I was voting for Sen. Kerry. “I did not know you were a liberal Democrat,” was the way it was phrased.

Dr. King was considered a liberal Christian patriot. While in Greensboro, many decent Christians expressed this sentiment: “(We) will maintain and defend the foundations on which the power of our nation rests. (We) will offer strong protection to Christianity as the very basis of our collective morality.

Today Christians stand at the head of our country. We want to fill our culture again with the Christian spirit. We want to burn out all the recent immoral developments in literature, in the theatre, and in the press—in short, we want to burn out the poison of immorality which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of liberal excess during the past years.”

This will be echoed again in Washington, D.C., this coming Inauguration Day.

The quote above was from a German former corporal named Adolf Hitler. Dr. King did not mind being called a “liberal.” Neither do I.

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Vergara is a Social Studies 6th grade teacher at San Vicente Elementary School and writes a regular column for the Saipan Tribune.