Re: on privatization and accountability

[Cbgord@aol.com]

I'd ask you what part of King's view of nonviolence, justice, and  human 
dignity you don't understand, Art, but you've already answered that  question 
nearly every time you post to this list.
Bye.
Craig
 
P.S. For those on this list who would like to learn more about King's  core 
messages and values, here is an article by Vincent Harding, a  veteran of and 
scholar on the Civil Rights movement. It's an antidote to the  convenient, 
pacifying image fed to us on on King's birthday each year.  Harding's article, 
written on the eve of invasion of Iraq, clears up  the confusion some have (or 
try to encourage) about King's nonviolence: it is  not simply the absence of 
violence, but a revolutionary force that came to  include King's plan for massive 
civil disobedience to disrupt Washington,  D.C. and other cities in a 
campaign to end poverty in the U.S.  That  effort, the Poor People's Campaign, was to 
begin in May 1968, but in April  King was murdered. 
 
The Road to  Redemption 
http://www.theotherside.org/archive/jan-feb03/

By _Vincent Harding_ (http://www.theotherside.org/authors/harding.html)   
With the approach of another national  holiday in his honor, the predominant 
public image of Martin Luther King, Jr.,  will again be the 1963 March on 
Washington. We will be inundated with the  iconic scene: The Black Baptist 
preacher announces to the nation and the world,  in unparalleled, magnificent 
oratory, "I Have a Dream!"  
Truly, that hot August day in the  nation's capital almost forty years ago is 
hallowed historical ground in the  slow unfolding of the promise of American 
democracy. Both the man and that  moment merit celebration. But our manner of 
celebrating reveals a deeply flawed  and distorted understanding of Martin 
Luther King, Jr.  
Brother Martin spent a fair amount of  time in jail, but his worst 
imprisonment may be how his own nation has frozen  him in that moment in 1963. Our 
national memory wants that triumphant,  sun-drenched hero to stay right there, 
static, bound to the podium before the  adoring crowds. We want to be lulled into 
contentment by his beautiful words,  his familiar cadences. We want to keep 
him safely, unthreateningly, on a  pedestal.  
 
Our fixation on Martin's "Dream" is  symptomatic of a dangerous collective 
amnesia. We insist on approaching King in  a way that makes him easy to handle; 
we want King to fit our agendas.  Increasingly, the nation wants to package 
him, market him—and thereby ignore  him. The poet Carl Wendell Himes, Jr., who 
was only in his twenties when Martin  was assassinated, articulated this 
domestication of King eloquently: Now that  he is safely dead / Let us praise him / 
build monuments to his glory / sing  hosannas to his name. / Dead men make / 
such convenient heroes: They cannot rise  / to challenge the images / we would 
fashion from their lives. / And besides, /  it is easier to build monuments / 
than to make a better world.  
As Himes said, the issue for King  then—and for us now—is making a better 
world. The "Dream" is not a cozy,  abstract idea floating in our conscience and 
memory. It grows out of and flows  back into the practical, active work and 
struggle for social transformation. We  would like to forget that Martin Luther 
King, Jr., did not ascend into the skies  from the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, 
but spent five hard years—searching,  experimenting, stumbling, sometimes 
lonely, and often beleaguered—trying to find  the way to continue moving toward a 
humanized America. We  would like to forget that it was not the weaver of 
gentle, sunny dreams of  freedom who was shot down on a balcony in Memphis, 
Tennessee. Rather it was a man who, as one  scholar described him in his final year, 
"represented a far greater political  threat to the reigning American 
government than he ever had before."  
Yes, King's 1963 articulation of his  dream of a racism-free United  States 
is historical holy ground. But in good  biblical tradition, holy ground—whether 
it's Jacob's stone altar, Moses' burning  bush, or Jesus' mountain of 
Transfiguration—are places from which we move on,  from which we draw strength to 
continue the journey, advancing more deeply in  truth, passion, and courage.  
Peter sought to imprison a transfigured  Jesus by building tents on the 
mountaintop—which would have impeded the  messianic mission and the path of 
discipleship. We too must resist the  temptation to shelter Brother Martin in a tent 
of "civil rights." We must follow  Martin beyond Washington. We must follow 
him as he moves  into dark places where dreams struggle against nightmares, 
places of risk and  trial, places of deeper prophetic challenges and no easy 
answers. We must follow  him toward a vision that is broader, richer, more 
compelling, more demanding.  
Our task is not simply a matter of proper  historical understanding, as 
critical as that is. We must reclaim Martin  precisely because the times demand it. 
As the bombs fall, as the poor cry out in  greater numbers, as the earth 
convulses beneath the weight of global economic  power, we must attend to the 
words and the life of this prophet among us. If we  are content with little more 
than a vision of Black and White children holding  hands, we are hardly 
empowered to stop the bombs from falling. If we settle for  a tamed version of Martin 
King as a moderate integrationist, we will fall prey  to cynicism and 
despair, and we'll lack the imagination and social inventiveness  necessary in 
genuine social struggle. In these days of war, we must heed K ing's  call for 
nonviolent revolution.  
 
The first task in overcoming our  collective amnesia and reclaiming Martin is 
to recall that the focus of the 1963  March on Washington was "Jobs, Peace, 
and Freedom."  
As early as its founding in 1957, the  Southern Christian Leadership 
Conference (SCLC), a principal organization behind  much of the Southern civil-rights 
struggle, had adopted as its motto, "We have  come to redeem the soul of 
America." That redemption would  require more than dismantling the dehumanizing Jim 
Crow system. When Martin  spoke in Washington, he and his fellow freedom  
strugglers were well aware that little children holding each other's hands  
across racial lines, wonderful though that may be, was not enough: Their mothers  
and fathers needed to be able to work. They needed a share of political power 
to  determine their future.  
In the 1963 speech itself, Martin  addressed thousands of men and women who, 
he acknowledged, came to the nation's  capital from places and situations of 
difficult struggle, who had been through  "excessive trials and tribulation." 
His words that day were not an end, but a  beginning. He made it clear that 
neither he nor the nation could rest in the  sunlight and enthusiasm, but had to 
continue, even intensify, the work and  struggle on behalf of the nation's 
poorest, most marginal, and most vulnerable  citizens. "Go back," he exhorted 
that assembly—to the Southern segregated towns,  to the Northern ghettos. Keep 
moving, he told them.  
Martin, too, would keep moving. For him,  the road toward America's 
redemption would lead him to retrace his steps back to  Birmingham, Alabama, where, 
just three weeks later, White terrorist bombers  would destroy a church—and the 
lives of four children. The following summer,  that road would take him to 
Mississippi, upon hearing that three young  freedom workers were missing, probably 
dead.  
In 1965, after the tremendous success of  the great pilgrimage, the march 
from Selma to  Montgomery, the  road led Martin to places of deeper national 
woundedness: the Northern urban  centers. While many in the movement were content 
to focus on civil rights, he  challenged us: "We've got to take on those 
terrible schools, those dilapidated  neighborhoods, that rotting housing. We've got 
to figure out why people have to  walk around our cities without jobs when 
they want to work. We can't stop, we've  got to keep going." The struggle needed 
to move on to even more dangerous  terrain.  
In the summer of 1965, after President  Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting 
Rights Act, Martin saw Watts break out in flames. Though he had no solutions at  
hand, he went there, facing a barrage of rocks, witnessing the burned-out  
buildings. He listened, he learned, he followed the uncertain road to uncharted  
territory, within the nation and within himself.  
The next year he left Alabama for Chicago—to  West Lawndale, one of the 
city's toughest,  neediest places. There, he spoke words that cut against the 
social grain, now as  much as then: "I choose to identify with the underprivileged. 
I choose to  identify with the poor. I choose to give my life for the hungry. 
I choose to  give my life for those who have been left out of the sunlight of 
opportunity. I  choose to live for and with those who find themselves seeing 
life as a long and  desolate corridor with no exit sign. This is the way I'm 
going. If it means  suffering a little bit, I'm going that way. If it means 
sacrificing, I'm going  that way. If it means dying for them, I'm going that way, 
because I heard a  voice saying, ‘Do something for others.'"  
Like the Christ he followed, King  understood the road to redemption would go 
through hard places. For him, that  meant confronting the rage of the 
exploding ghettos, the turbulent wisdom of the  Black Power movement, the increasing 
harassment from his own government. It  meant looking with unblinking vision 
on the brutality and violence in the world  (violence which threatened him 
personally, as he knew all too well). And it  meant a profound inner struggle with 
the question: "Do I still believe in  nonviolence?"  
But his conviction of the way of  nonviolence only deepened, broadened, 
became ever more relevant to a nation in  need of redemption. Martin kept moving—
toward nothing less than a vision of a  nonviolent revolution.  
 
Throughout the 1960s, king's vision of  peace and freedom was expanding 
beyond national borders. Part of his sense of  urgency had to do with the rising 
force of violence, not only in the exploding  cities of the North, but far more 
massively and destructively in the  U.S. war on the peoples of  Vietnam.  
Against the advice of colleagues and  allies in the movement (many of whom 
feared that angering President Johnson  would threaten progress on civil 
rights), King knew he had to act on his vision  and his conscience. "Never again will 
I be silent on an issue that is destroying  the soul of our nation and 
destroying thousands and thousands of little children  in Vietnam. . . . The time 
has come for  a real prophecy, and I'm willing to go that road." King could see 
clearly how  the struggle for justice domestically was being subverted by the 
reality of  Vietnam. The poor of the  United  States were being swept up to 
become victims  and executioners in ever larger numbers. The poor of Vietnam 
were  being destroyed physically and culturally. Moreover, the cruel devastation 
of an  unjust war was draining billions of dollars and lifetimes of energy and 
 creativity out of the nation's potential for dealing with the needs of its 
own  poor people.  
Citing his commitment to nonviolence and  his vocation as a Christian 
minister, he said, "Violence is as wrong in  Hanoi as it is in Harlem." He pressed 
SCLC to move away from its caution and  issue a statement condemning "the 
immorality and tragic absurdity" of the  U.S. role in Indochina. He called on 
churches—Black and White—to teach  their young people what Jesus said about loving 
enemies and to support them in  opting for conscientious objection to military 
service.  
By 1967 and 1968, Martin was articulating  a peace that stretched far beyond 
the end of particular wars, even so horrible a  war as the one in Vietnam. For 
him, the  United  States could pursue effective peace only as  this nation 
recognized how intrinsically peace is joined to justice, especially  justice in 
the uses and distribution of the world's common resources. Indeed,  Martin 
repeatedly said the United States was "on the wrong side  of a world revolution," 
one in which the poor and landless people are determined  to press 
relentlessly toward justice, toward land, toward self-development and  
self-determination, toward their own best humanity. Martin saw his own  government and 
corporate forces using the smoke screen of "anti-communism" to  win over our people to 
this fundamentally anti-revolutionary role. Today, he  would undoubtedly 
critique the same political manipulation of the language of  "anti-terrorism" that 
buttresses a range of regressive and repressive policies.  
Despite increasingly fierce backlash from  the U.S. government and the FBI,  
alienation from many supporters, threats to SCLC's funding, and diminishment 
of  his public stature, Martin refused to back down. The road to the nation's  
redemption required the speaking of hard truths. The core crisis, he said, was 
 the U.S. refusal to recognize that "the  evils of capitalism are as real as 
the evils of militarism and evils of racism."  Now, in all of his speeches, 
King called for the United States to  free itself from "the triple evils of 
racism, extreme materialism, and  militarism."  
Thirty-five years ago, he could not have  foreseen either the staggering sums 
being poured into the Pentagon today nor the  drastic retrenchment of federal 
support for poor and struggling communities.  Perhaps more than ever, we need 
those who will lift up anew his prophetic  message both to the nation and to 
the people of faith.  
 
By 1967, ever moving forward, King had  also expanded his vision of economic 
justice and what it would require of this  nation. That spring, he told 
journalist David Halberstam, "For years I labored  with the idea of reforming the 
existing institutions of the society, a little  change here, a little change 
there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you've  got to have a reconstruction 
of the entire society." Martin knew there could be  no adequate jobs for 
Black people in the United States  until the nation had turned itself toward the 
unconditional goal of providing  fulfilling work and adequate income for 
everyone in the society.  
King also knew that such a goal could not  be achieved here unless the 
economic, political, and value structures of this  nation were challenged and 
transformed. The movement for justice, he said quite  clearly, must broaden its 
horizon. "After Selma and the voting-rights bill, we moved into  a new era, which 
must be an era of revolution. I think we must see the great  distinction here 
between a reform movement and a revolutionary movement."  
With his time being counted in months  (did he know that the bullet was 
coming?), King pushed himself, his staff, and  the broader movement beyond the 
comfortable, easy analyses and solutions. Even  integration, he said, must be more 
sharply defined: In the earlier era of the  movement, "integration" meant 
Black people (in relatively small doses) would  move gratefully, unquestioningly, 
into the White-owned American "mainstream."  True integration, King saw ever 
more clearly, was a challenge to the status quo;  it meant nothing less than 
shared power. Nor was he calling for power for  power's sake, but rather power 
at the service of radical social transformation.  
"The White power structure is still  seeking to keep the walls of segregation 
and inequality substantially intact,"  King told his staff at a retreat that 
fall. The struggle, he argued, must become  one of recreating the nation. He 
was convinced that capitalism as it was  constructed could not meet the needs 
of poor people; instead, he began to speak  with his staff and allies about the 
need for some kind of democratic socialism.  
King was unclear about how this would be  done, but he was constantly 
searching. (Perhaps it would have been good to stop  and listen to voices from 
within. He often spoke of longing for an extended time  of silence and retreat, 
moving toward the center of his being. The letters of  Thomas Merton even indicate 
that plans were underway in the spring of 1968 for  King to come to the 
Gethsemane Abbey for a retreat with Merton.) In the midst of  the search, only one 
element of the revolutionary way ahead seemed constantly  clear to him: 
Nonviolence had to be at its center. King was in search of a way  that much of the 
world still deems impossible, the way of revolutionary  nonviolence.  
By the last fall and winter of his life,  King announced that this way of 
massive nonviolent civil disobedience would  become the center of his movement 
for the next major initiative—the "Poor  People's Campaign." His plan was to 
mobilize and train thousands of the poor and  their allies to come to the 
nation's capital and "just camp here and stay" until  the country's elected leaders 
acted on the urgent needs of the poor. "The city  will not function," he 
warned, until Congress created and approved "a massive  program on the part of the 
federal government that will make jobs or income a  reality for every American 
citizen."  
King was envisioning more than Washington as target.  "We've got to find a 
method that will disrupt other cities if necessary, create  the crisis that will 
force the nation to look at the situation, dramatize it,  and yet at the same 
time not destroy life or property," he said. He was  challenging the nation 
to turn from its insane war and from its stifling  materialism, and face the 
poor. He was planning to bring the poor of every  color, to stand and sit where 
they could not be missed. "We've got to camp  in—put our tents in front of the 
White House. . . . We've got to make it known  that until our problem is 
solved, America may have many, many days, but  they will be full of trouble. There 
will be no rest, there will no tranquillity  in this country until the nation 
comes to terms with our problem."  
 
If we listen to him in the last years of  his life, we hear Martin 
desperately calling us away from the mentality that  seeks a piece of the American pie, 
that makes for American wars. Rather, he  urged upon himself, on each of us, a 
revolution in our values. He challenged us  to search for a new recipe, 
develop a new pie based on compassion and human  solidarity rather than on maximum 
profits. This broadening vision was—and is  still—no less a challenge to 
King's African American sisters and brothers. He  challenged his own community on 
these very issues, urging us not to fall into a  smug satisfaction with a 
place in the U.S. social world, but rather to move  forward to a new world, a new 
system.  
He called all Americans away from our  spiritually debilitating worship of 
material wealth. Looking to the poor on  every hand, understanding something of 
the relationship between poverty and  exploitation at home and abroad, 
refusing to be silenced by the allurements of  middle-class comforts, by the 
governmentally orchestrated threats of personal  blackmail or the repeated threats of 
violent death, King was ever moving  forward, continuing his search for 
audacious solutions.  
The nonviolent revolution he envisioned  was growing—beyond national borders, 
but also beyond simple political  formulations. It was a spiritual revolution 
as well. His call was an urgent  invitation to turn sharply away from our 
commitment to an ever-ascending,  ever-stifling, "higher standard of living," and 
to set our faces in compassion  toward the poor of every color of every land. 
He was calling us to give our  imaginations, our skills, our training, our 
energies, and perhaps our lives to  the tasks of eliminating the great human 
scourges of hunger, exploitation, and  war, to find in such work the roots of 
peace, the roots of our humanity, the  presence of God.  
In the spring of 1968, the task of  redeeming the nation's soul led Martin to 
Memphis. There, this world figure, a Nobel  Prize laureate with a Ph.D. in 
philosophical theology and a host of awards and  honorary degrees, cast his tent 
with garbage workers. Many of his colleagues  felt this trip was an 
unnecessary diversion. But for Martin, what was at stake  was nothing less than the 
nonviolent revolution. He saw the sanitation workers'  struggle as part of the 
work for world peace—which he understood was linked to  economic justice and to 
the radical redistribution of wealth, nationally and  internationally. His 
concern for the poor had burst the boundaries of race and  nationality, had 
transformed the meaning of the movement he had helped to  create, had allowed him 
to grope toward creative responses to the history raging  all around him.  
This was far from an appealing dream of  Black and White children holding 
hands. He was moving toward the wilderness,  into the unknown and uncertain, 
seeking to transform himself, his organizations,  and supporters, moving 
constantly toward the Promised Land of faith and courage,  seeking to find ways to 
create that which did not yet exist.  
While a bullet shaped and aimed by many  hands was keeping vigil, some two 
thousand persons braved a soaking rain to hear  King's final public speech. With 
a storm raging outside, he articulated those  words almost as familiar as the 
1963 speech, declaring that he had seen the  Promised Land, testifying that 
all fear was gone and that he was ready for  whatever might come. He promised 
the crowd that they would get to the Promised  Land. But he also challenged 
them: "Let us move on in these powerful days, these  days of challenge to make 
America what it ought to be. We have  an opportunity to make America a better 
nation."  
This was the heart of Martin's vision and  vocation: making this nation what 
it ought to be, tapping its best  possibilities, expanding democracy to its 
fullest and richest and most inclusive  breadth. And that could only happen if 
we move on, move forward, just as he did.  
Our nation is in danger of moving  backward, not forward. Our government 
stokes an anti-terrorism and anti-Iraq  atmosphere, emphasizing national power and 
security. It intensifies imperialist  tendencies abroad and fosters longings 
for safety and material welfare at home.  The same power system promoting such 
policies will hold official celebrations,  trotting out a small, static, and 
safe version of Martin Luther King, Jr.  
These too are days of challenge and  opportunity. We must reclaim Martin, the 
faithful, struggling child of God, the  searching, risk-taking brother, the 
nonviolent revolutionary. He's still  pointing us to the Promised Land.  
Let us move on.