MLK: 'Where do we go from here?'

Rereading Where Do We Go From Here? recently, I was taken by the beauty of Martin's arguments and the power with which he made his points. Martin confronts the issues of militarism and racial and economic injustice in the U.S. with more power than any other writer and thinker that I have ever read. He made the connection between injustice and the quagmire of Vietnam, and speaking so forcefully and clearly against these horrors would cost him his life. The book is perhaps the greatest testament to his vision of justice in this society, and his most quoted source after his "I Have A Dream" speech.

From it, the reader finds:

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

"The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty."

"The bombs in Vietnam explode at home; they destroy the hopes and possibilities for a decent America."

"Many of the ugly pages of American history have been obscured and forgotten. . . . America owes a debt of justice which it has only begun to pay. If it loses the will to finish or slackens in its determination, history will recall its crimes and the country that
would be great will lack the most indispensable element of greatness -- justice."

In the early morning hours following the election I thought that Martin Luther King may have thought, had he lived, that his prediction about the moral arc of the universe pointing toward justice may have risen ever so slightly from the ashes as the Phoenix of mythology. But, he might have cautioned that pursuing an endless war in Afghanistan and a permanent military presence in Iraq, and in the larger Middle East, is both wrong and immoral.

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