On a breezy, sun-drenched Sunday, President Obama stepped to the podium at the Martin Luther King Jr National Memorial to induct the great civil rights leader and peace activist into America's pantheon of heroes. The president's dedication rightly praised the "moral imagination" of Dr King, whose March on Washington demanded jobs and dignity for all Americans.
Unfortunately the president only glorified two-thirds of the man, now stone, staring out across the Tidal Basin. While racial and economic opportunity were certainly two sides of Dr King's pyramid of social justice, President Obama made only passing references to the third: peace. That choice was as deliberate as it was cowardly, because a full accounting of who Dr King was and what he stood for would demonstrate how very far removed President Obama is from the man he was celebrating.
To celebrate King's "I Have a Dream" speech is easy, as the president well knows: "That is what our school children remember best when they think of Dr King." But wrestling with the radical pacifist message of King's "A Time to Break Silence" would have meant confronting the truth that the man the president was memorializing, if alive, would be marching against him today.
Addressing New York City's Riverside Church in the spring of 1967, King delivered possibly his most subversive speech of his radical career. A staunch opponent of the war in Vietnam, King called the American government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" and excoriated the nation's addiction to militarism. It's not a message of the preacher's taught frequently in schools or quoted in preppy pundit columns, and it's certainly not a quotation etched on the memorial's inscription wall.
But what's undeniable is that those words remain true today under the administration of the commander-in-chief. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq grind on. The American military intervenes in Libya and Uganda without congressional approval. Killer drones increasingly prowl the Pakistani, Somali, and Yemeni wildernesses killing civilians and alleged terrorists alike. In just the last month, drones have assassinated three American citizens in Yemen, a country the White House has not declared war on, without the executive formally presenting any charges against them.
Cynically, American military aid flows to the butchers of Bahrain [pdf] and Yemen, who desperately cling to power while denying democracy and dignity to their people. "[T]he western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries," King said four decades ago. Not much has changed, and the effects have been devastating.
Counting only the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies conservatively estimates the carnage has killed 236,000 people and displaced nearly 8 million people, or the total populations of Connecticut and Kentucky fleeing their homes.
While King's pacifism and denunciations of militarism sprang from his Christian faith, he understood the calamity and waste of war in a way that transcended faith and ideology. King recognized not only the gross immorality of war, but its opportunity costs as well.
Speaking about Vietnam, he explained the clear connection between war and poverty to those gathered at Riverside Church. "I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and 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 said. "So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such."
The same dynamic continues today. Since 9/11, the United States has spent an estimated $3.2 to $4tn, reports the Watson Institute, fighting these multiple wars and low-intensity conflicts throughout the Middle East and North Africa, including the $1tn homeland security-intelligence complex built to protect the nation from the blow back of these foreign policies. It isn't hard to identify areas where that money would have been better spent or simply returned to the taxpayer. "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death," Dr King cautioned, his words more tragically relevant than ever.
"Nearly 50 years after the March on Washington, our work, Dr King's work, is not yet complete," President Obama said solemnly. How very true, and no one more powerful is standing in the way of that work than the man uttering those words.
Sometimes decency dictates that one turn down a speaking engagement, however august, even if the campaign season's afoot.
Follow Matthew Harwood on Twitter @mharwood31