Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Martin Luther King ,Jesus, Social Justice and Glenn Beck and Bradley manning

UPDATED: 12:19 PM, Jan. 19, 2011.
...nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time: the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression.

Civilization and violence are antithetical concepts.

Negroes of the United States, following the people of India, have demonstrated that nonviolence is not sterile passivity, but a powerful moral force which makes for social transformation.

Sooner or later, all the peoples of the world will have to discover a way to live together in PEACE, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood.

If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation.

The foundation of such a method is LOVE
.


Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Noble acceptance speech 1967.


Martin Luther King on war






First, as has become an annual ritual, politicians went to church or some other civic gathering for last year’s King Day celebration, even as they continued to support public policies that he found abhorrent. Whether continuing to prosecute a seemingly endless and most definitely murderous war, or by supporting cuts to vital social programs, there is no shortage of hypocrisy when it comes to proclaiming fealty to King’s vision in words, while besmirching it in deeds, all at once.


...In short, by not understanding the fundamental truth of King’s message that an injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, we have created a society, 43 years since his death, where injustice and suffering are rampant. And one in which the dreams of the civil rights movement appear the fantastical products of some Ambien-induced haze. Only by putting away, forever, the safe and sanitized version of this man and his compatriots, might we ever awaken from the stupor and become worthy of that which we celebrate this week.

From:We Twisted King’s Dream, So We Live With His Nightmare by Tim Wise via CommonDreams .org Jan. 17, 2011


and on King's legacy:

...Let us remember that Dr. King was more than a leader of the civil rights movement. He also advocated for those living in poverty and spoke out against the Vietnam War. When he began to speak out against the war, he was questioned why he did that instead of focusing on civil rights. King responded in his speech at the Riverside Church in New York City:
"And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live."

Dr. King went on to link all of the movements for peace and justice at home and abroad and to call for a radical revolution of values. He said that we must move from a "thing-oriented society" to a "person-oriented society."

From :
Revolution of Values: From MLK, Jr. to Bradley Manning via CommonDreams by Margaret Flowers, Jan. 18, 2011


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We 've been considering the ideals that martin Luther king Jr. preached about social and economic justice , equal rights and putting an end to America's use of force to maintain and expand its empire. He also called for a nation who's citizens were more compassionate, understanding and empathetic.

Yes there is has been progress but there is still much left undone.
It is still an ongoing struggle because there are those who like Glann Beck and the Tea Party Republicans want to return to the good old days when women , non-whites and gays and progressives (read commie sympathizers ) all knew their place and accepted the natural hierarchy as dictated to them by the white male elite.
For some reason Beck and others conclude that Jesus would approve everybody carrying gun and blasting away at some kid who just stole a loaf of bread or incarcerate him for 20 years.
They also appear to believe that Jesus hated the peacemakers and loved Warriors-human killing machines.
And they say he would approve of these disastrous war and killing off of those who are not tin their view true Believers including those of different religions.

According to Glenn Beck and others on the right they dislike the whole notion of Social Justice. They believe that any Christian who believes in or preaches social justice is really a commie/Nazi and is not a true Christian . Given Beck's own personal wealth with an income of $23 million a year I guess he feels he is one of the real victims of any sort of social and economic justice because he might be made to pay what others believe would be his his fair share of taxes.

But many Christians and their churches believe that at the core of Jesus' message is that of social justice. This is exemplified by the Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes.Jesus is not just interested in rituals

But Beck preaches that Jesus believed in individuality , self-reliance and that one fails or is successful based upon your own labor in a Capitalist Free Market place economy . This he believe is part of God's Law that God and Jesus favor the rich and successful and the poor not so much.
As I have said before is the oddity of all of this is that Hitler himself saw Jesus in almost the same terms that is the angry passionate Jesus who using a whip chased the money lenders out of the Temple and who hated the jews and the poor and those who are not very successful.
Greed and avarice he believes are good values.


Sorry Mr Beck Jesus Preached Social Justice Countdown



Glenn Beck on Social Justice- The Young Turks




and here's a couple of articles related to Martin Luther King's legacy.

Let us remember that Dr. King was more than a leader of the civil rights movement. He also advocated for those living in poverty and spoke out against the Vietnam War. When he began to speak out against the war, he was questioned why he did that instead of focusing on civil rights. King responded in his speech at the Riverside Church in New York City:

"And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live."

Dr. King went on to link all of the movements for peace and justice at home and abroad and to call for a radical revolution of values. He said that we must move from a "thing-oriented society" to a "person-oriented society."


Revolution of Values: From MLK, Jr. to Bradley Manning via CommonDreams by Margaret Flowers, Jan. 18, 2011


Yesterday I stood with 200 activists at the gates of Quantico Marine Base to protest the imprisonment and torture of a young patriot, Bradley Manning, who has not been convicted of any crime. It was the right way to spend the day set aside to remember Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Manning, 23, is alleged to have provided Wikileaks with documents that expose war crimes and other unethical behaviors being committed by the United States. He reportedly first went to his commanding officer when he saw that Iraqis were being imprisoned and tortured at the behest of the US military for simply publishing a document which questioned where the money went in Iraq. He was told to get back to work. Apparently when he saw more evidence of war crimes, he felt that the American public must know what is being done in its name. Manning is said to have joined the military because he believed in his country.

Many of us held photos of Manning and signs that said, "I am Bradley Manning." In essence, each of us who love our country and who speak out for the betterment of the United States are brothers and sisters of young Manning. And sadly, each of us who does speak out risks consequences of imprisonment like Manning.

We started the day at the FBI headquarters in Washington to protest the treatment of peace and justice activists who have had their homes raided, their private property stolen and who are facing an investigation by a Grand Jury. In some cases, these social justice groups had been infiltrated by undercover FBI agents for as long as 2 ½ years. This is what our tax dollars fund: domestic spying on peaceful social justice activists.

It takes courage to speak out against the great corporate interests in this nation be they the military-industrial complex, the financial institutions or the healthcare-industrial complex. Not everyone has the courage to do so. I am driven by the words of Dr. King when he said "to be silent is to be complicit."

I cannot be silent when tens of millions of people in the US have no health insurance. I cannot be complicit when tens of thousands are suffering, when tens of thousands die of preventable causes, when families go bankrupt and lose their homes because of medical illness. I cannot be silent when health professionals are being driven out of practice by the insatiable greed of corporate health care

Let us remember that Dr. King was more than a leader of the civil rights movement. He also advocated for those living in poverty and spoke out against the Vietnam War. When he began to speak out against the war, he was questioned why he did that instead of focusing on civil rights. King responded in his speech at the Riverside Church in New York City:

"And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live."

Dr. King went on to link all of the movements for peace and justice at home and abroad and to call for a radical revolution of values. He said that we must move from a "thing-oriented society" to a "person-oriented society."


And Tom Wise asks if we as a society truly honored King's legacy -


We Twisted King’s Dream, So We Live With His Nightmare by Tim Wise via CommonDreams .org Jan. 17, 2011

It’s been a rough year for Martin Luther King, Jr., and for his legacy.

First, as has become an annual ritual, politicians went to church or some other civic gathering for last year’s King Day celebration, even as they continued to support public policies that he found abhorrent. Whether continuing to prosecute a seemingly endless and most definitely murderous war, or by supporting cuts to vital social programs, there is no shortage of hypocrisy when it comes to proclaiming fealty to King’s vision in words, while besmirching it in deeds, all at once.

Then of course came the venal cooptation of King’s crowning public moment—the 1963 March on Washington—by Glenn Beck, this past August. Insisting that it was time to “reclaim the civil rights movement,” because conservatives were the ones who “did it in the first place”—an inversion of history so grotesque as to confound the imagination—Beck inspired a gathering of tens of thousands of disaffected (mostly white) reactionaries, likely none of whom had been involved with the civil rights movement, but who now would be encouraged to see themselves as the inheritors of King’s “dream.” This, even as they clamored for more tax cuts for wealthy folks and the repeal of health care reform, all at the behest of a guy who once said he would like to kill Rep. Charlie Rangel with a shovel. I will leave it to others far more creative than myself to determine how one might square any of that with the teachings or beliefs of Dr. King. Then again, given the recent statement by a Defense Department spokesperson who asserted that King would have supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, anything is possible.

And this is especially true in a nation that has so thoroughly sanitized and compartmentalized King’s message, and King himself, within the pantheon of national heroes. We have turned King into a milquetoast moderate whose agenda went little beyond the ability to sit next to white people on a bus. We’ve stripped away from the public remembrance of this man his calls for income redistribution, his insistence that the United States has become the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” and his proclamation that poverty, racism and militarism are the “triple evils” that America’s rulers have not the courage to confront


When conservatives can effectively twist King’s singular line about judging people on the “content of their character” rather than the color of their skin into a reason to oppose affirmative action, even though he openly supported such efforts in his writings and interviews in 1961, 1963, 1965 and again in 1967, it ought not surprise us that folks are a bit confused about who King was, and about the principles for which he stood.

The way in which we have forgotten or been misled about King’s legacy is never more apparent than when asking children what they know about his message. Sadly, when I have done so, the most typical answer given is that King stood for not “hitting people,” or “not hitting back if they hit you first,” or that his message would be, were he alive today, “don’t join a gang.” While all these things are true I suppose, they rather miss the point.


After all, King’s commitment to non-violence had a purpose larger than non-violence itself. Non-violence was, for King and the movement, a means to a larger end of social, political and economic justice. Non-violence was a tactic meant to topple racism and economic exploitation, and lead the world away from cataclysmic warfare. That so many young people seem not to get that part, because teachers are apparently loathe to give it to them, renders King’s non-violent message no more particularly important than the banal parental reminder that we should “use our words” to resolve conflicts, rather than our fists. Thanks, but if that message were all it took to get a national holiday named for you, my mother would have had her own years ago.

So we compartmentalize the non-violence message, much as we compartmentalize books about King and the movement in that section of the bookstore established for African-American history; much as we have compartmentalized those streets named for the man, locating them only in the blackest and often poorest parts of town.

Were this tendency to render King divisible on multiple levels—abstracting non-violence from justice, colorblindness from racial equity, and public service from radical social transformation—merely an academic matter, it would hardly merit our concern. But its impact is greater than that. Our only hope as a society is to see the connections between the issues King was addressing and our current predicament, to see that what affects part of the whole affects the greater body, to understand that racism and racial inequity must be of concern to us all, because they pose risks to us all.

For instance, were it not for the indifference to black and brown suffering that animated much of the early non-response to the subprime mortgage crisis (which manifested initially in the mid ’90s, but received little attention and even less government action), perhaps steps would have been taken to prevent what has become, now, a full-blown housing collapse. But rather than seeing the exploitation of low income folks of color as a national emergency, most politicians and media ignored it, or blamed the victims of predatory lending for being too stupid to read the fine print on their loan documents. As such, the lenders branched out, unregulated for the most part, into whiter and middle-class communities, where they took advantage of folks there, too. Now, millions of middle class white folks find themselves on the verge of economic catastrophe, precisely because the suffering of the other was ignored for so long, and eventually, as suffering is wont to do, metastasized.

Likewise, if double-digit unemployment had been viewed as the emergency it is, when only people of color were experiencing it (as they typically have been, in good times or bad, year after year throughout this century), perhaps lawmakers might have seen fit to address the problem. But it wasn’t, and so they didn’t. And now whites are experiencing double-digit joblessness as well, for the first time in over three generations.

And if we had not long ago racialized the “have-nots” as undeserving people of color, thereby allowing racial bias to block government actions that might have been taken on their behalf—like universal health care or massive investment in job creation—perhaps we would not today have tens of millions of people, including millions of white folks, lacking access to medical treatment or job security. But we did, and so we do. And now we can witness white folks running around, speaking against health care reforms from which they would personally gain, all because of a fear that some of the benefits might go to “undeserving” immigrants of color, or lazy folks (typically perceived as black and brown) who don’t want to pay for their own care.

In short, by not understanding the fundamental truth of King’s message that an injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, we have created a society, 43 years since his death, where injustice and suffering are rampant. And one in which the dreams of the civil rights movement appear the fantastical products of some Ambien-induced haze. Only by putting away, forever, the safe and sanitized version of this man and his compatriots, might we ever awaken from the stupor and become worthy of that which we celebrate this week.

and so it goes,
GORD.

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