More on MLK and Obama...

This article puts it nicely.

This speech by MLK himself is historically accurate, and indeed applicable to our times.

I especially like these lines:

"It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin...we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."

(As in Vietnam, Iraq, and other wars, it is the love of stuff that keeps us where we are and ensures others suffer for our comfort. There is a link between our wallets and suffering overseas)

"True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."

"A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth...it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, 'This is not just.'"

"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

"We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation."

Note how Obama marginalized King's words while accepting the peace prize:

" "The non-violence practiced by men like Gandhi and King may not have been practical or possible in every circumstance..."


From accounts of our older leaders, we learn that the Vietnam war was fought on behalf of American investments/Wall Street. We prevented a self-democratic process, set up a Harvard-educated dictator, and denied pleads for aid and peace, then intentionally slaughtered as many innocent people as possible to break the backs of the Vietnamese people. We prevented an entire nation from choosing, in an election, their own type of government. Then we used the type of government they wanted (a sort of communism) as an excuse to go to war.

This is all to familiar...