Why Martin Luther King Had To die

King's Death Doomed U.S. and All

will be published Friday 4/4/08 Daily Hampshire Gazette

Forty years ago April 4th a shot rang out in Memphis which changed America forever when it killed Martin Luther King Jr. But the seeds of that assassin’s bullet were sown exactly a year before when King delivered his greatest and most everlasting speech: “Why I oppose the war in Vietnam”.
For the most important question is not the tail-chasing, conspiracy laden “Who killed King?” But the far more tragic “Why did King have to die?”
And on April 4th, 1967 he gave the speech which sealed his doom – and maybe America’s too. For in that speech he laid down his agreed upon mandate as a civil rights leader, and picked up the mantle of true revolutionary. In that speech he made it clear that his goal was not for Rosa Parks to sit wherever she wanted, but to dismantle what he said were the very foundations on which America stood. The “triple evil… of racism, economic exploitation and militarism.”
Since his death America sadly has embraced the sanitized King of the 1963 “I have a dream” speech who wanted nothing more than for “little black boys and girls to join hands with little white boys and girls” in a rainbow version of America The Great. But by 1967 King himself had come to realize how meager that vision was, and found himself compelled against all advice to issue his unequivocal call for a “radical revolution in values.”
It was the bankrupting of the country and its unconditional surrender in the War on Poverty – through the squandering of resources in Vietnam -- which made him declare America a “society gone mad on war.” The single greatest American in the nation stood at a pulpit and declared the United States “the single greatest purveyor of violence in the world.”
He told a country convinced of its moral superiority that it acted like “a policeman of the whole world.” He had the outraged courage to warn that he heard “God telling America ‘You’re too arrogant! And if your don’t change your ways I will rise up and break the backbone of your power and place it in the hands of a nation that doesn’t even know My name!’”
King also ripped into the refusal of many Americans’ to oppose the war behind a cloying concern for “our troops” when he laid at their feet responsibility for the vets returning “physically handicapped and psychologically deranged” by the wounds they suffered and the violence they inflicted.
In that speech King declared his “eternal hostility to militarism” and issued a thinly veiled call to draft resistance when he specifically told the young men of America to “take a stand” against the war.
And all of this was not because we were losing in Vietnam; not because we were wrongly involved in someone else’s civil war; not because it was too expensive or making America less safe. No, his implacable opposition to the war came from his singular conviction that it was immoral.
Most touchingly, however, King made it clear his condemnation came from love. “I love America…There can be no great disappointment where there is no great love.” Above all what he wanted was for America “to come home” to its founding ideal that all people are created equal. “Come home America.”
And that love of country pushed him even further. Years after the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts became law, King was still not satisfied and declared his intention to escalate his struggle to include the “glaring contrast of poverty and wealth” in the richest nation on earth. He placed in this non-violent sights the multinational corporations which not only exploited Third World nations, he said, but “profited” from the Vietnam war and so opposed its speedy end.
But to truly understand that this speech is what marked him for death, you must listen to it. For it was not just the message which got him killed, but the medium. Go to YouTube and sit through those 22 minutes and 48 seconds of spine-tingling oratory and you will understand that someone listening in real time – whether James Earl Ray, J. Edgar Hoover or John Q. Public – shuddered, and decided that King must die.
But the King lives. Not in our official, non-threatening “remembrances” of him over a three-day weekend in January; but in our current national malaise which has reduced our political discourse and electoral politics to such a dumbed-down state that the sovereign citizenry, to which we all belong, seems more like an idiot man-child still lumbering through the world destroying nations, killing innocents by the thousands and bankrupting our children’s futures, while the gap between the One Percent and the rest of us grows ever wider and wilder.
True prophet that he was, King foretold of this malaise in 1967 when he warned that “a nation which spends more money on military defense than programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” As America continued to do that for 41 years, that spiritual death is long upon us.
And it does not matter what spiritual enlightenment we pursue individually or in small valleys, there is a core part of our collective spirit into which rigormortus has set.
The continuing price we pay for that bullet 40 years ago is that King in 1957 was far outside the mainstream consensus on race in this country; yet the arc of the moral universe bent towards him and the consensus shifted to meet King. In 1967 he was again far outside the mainstream consensus on America’s need for a “moral revolution”, and had he lived the country might yet again have shifted to meet him.
Dr. King would only be a bit older today than John McCain. What prospects America might have had if King had been alive on 9/11; or in 2003 when Bush marched Iraq and the US over the cliff of illegal, “preemptive” war?
If that sounds like crass nostalgia, go to YouTube, listen to that speech and when King says Vietnam hear Iraq, when he says communism hear terrorism, and you’ll know that after 40 years being dead, Martin Luther King Jr. is still our leading light.