Martin Luther King – Page 2

Violence is a many-layered thing

Posted on February 11, 2019February 11, 2019 by kathiemm

by Kathie MM

“My partner never took responsibility for his own actions. He blamed me incessantly, even for his own abusive behavior. When confronted, he always had some excuse to justify himself. At his hands, I was subjected to insults, put-downs, shouting, threats and sarcasm….He typically ended his verbal assaults by accusing me of provoking his abuse or telling me that I deserved it. …” [i]

Every reader of this blog recognizes this type of guy—an entitled bully who considers himself right at all times and becomes enraged at any sign of “disrespect” or threat to his “authority.” He’s the kind of guy whose behavior inspired the feminist movement–and more recently the “smash patriarchy” initiatives. And he’s everywhere.

Clearly there are many men who have respect for others, and who feel compassion and empathy for all who struggle with life’s challenges, even those who differ in gender, sexuality, skin color, faith, and/or national origins. But who is it that you see running, controlling, and bossing the “traditional families,” big corporations, military-industrial complexes, and governments? Who is it that wrote the laws, stacked the judiciaries, assumed control of the armies, and built the structures and shaped the cultures to ensure and strengthen their own power while enriching themselves? Not Sojourner Truth, not Harriet Tubman, not the Suffragettes, not Jane Addams, not Jeannette Rankin, not Rosa Parks, not Shirley Chisholm, not Medea Benjamin (and not Martin Luther King, Jr., or the many other male supporters of peace and justice, either).

So, if we want peace and justice, harmony and hope, to whom do we turn in these frightening times? The models for nonviolence and cooperation are everywhere too—it’s just harder for them to break through the Old Guard’s barriers without help from all of us who see the widespread injustices and looming catastrophes.

So, if you’re tired of seeing violence rewarded at every level of society while the rich get richer and just about everyone else gets poorer, don’t get in bed with the bad guys! Look for the people in your own community who recognize the threats to our environment and to humanity, and support their efforts. Free yourself from the corporate media.

While you’re at it, take a good look at current members of Congress. Identify, among both newer and established members of Congress, both female and male, Republican and Democrat, both those who are invested in the status quo, and those who will work to reform the corrupt structures endangering us all. Support the reformers, in and out of government. Our freedoms, our rights, our very lives are at stake.

And, for further ideas and opportunities, investigate organizations like Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (and support engaging peace).

[i] Adapted from a case study published in Family Violence in the United States, by Hines, Malley-Morrison, & Dutton, 2nd ed.

Growing into The Spirit of The Sixties

Posted on December 10, 2018December 10, 2018 by kathiemm

Stefan Schindler with John Lennon collage

by Stefan Schindler

In my early childhood – born just north of San Francisco, and fresh from two years in England – I spent four years in Texas, then one in Alabama, unconsciously absorbing from both states a culture of racism and American superiority.

Then the family moved to Japan, where I spent three years absorbing a new culture, and, subconsciously, an alternative worldview. It changed my life, and I shall be forever grateful. When the family moved from Japan to Pennsylvania, I was shocked to discover fellow students who had never been out of their home state. I was like a visitor from the moon.

My formal education continued to be mostly ignoration, but the year was 1960, just in time for me to grow into The Spirit of The Sixties. As I watched The Beatles evolve into Peacemakers, coinciding with my college years, I began to realize just how brainwashed I had been.

My father, a bomber pilot in World War Two, was a career officer in the U.S. Air Force, rising through the ranks to become a Lieutenant Colonel. Hence our family’s many moves around the country and the world. Hence also my military upbringing.

When I entered Dickinson College in 1966, I joined ROTC (and its elite “Pershing Rifles” group). I quit after six weeks, having been ordered to do this and that my entire life, and now, in college, finally free from my father’s commanding influence, and joyfully participating more and more in the anti-establishment counter-culture revolution.

By my senior year at Dickinson, 1970, while President Nixon continued The Vietnam War, I was a member of S.D.S – Students for a Democratic Society – and with fellow peacemakers disrupting ROTC drill performances on the football field, and, more importantly, marching in peace demonstrations outside the gates of the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, just a few blocks from Dickinson.

After graduate school, post-1975, I embarked upon a self-education program, leading to my further political awakening, a new appreciation for Mark Twain and William James as members of The Anti-Imperialism League, and the writing of my book, America’s Indochina Holocaust: The History and Global Matrix of The Vietnam War.

Now, just about a year from 2020, I see The United States of Amnesia failing to learn the lessons of history, and increasingly becoming a high-tech version of Plato’s cave, governed by plutocracy, divided more and more by economic apartheid, and careening toward ecological apocalypse, nuclear war, and another Great Depression. John Lennon was right – “We are led by lunatics.”

Fortunately, the spirit of Emerson, James, and Twain lives on in the activism, writings and wisdom of people like H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, I. F. Stone, Martin Luther King, Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, John Pilger, John Prados, Dan Ellsberg, the Berrigan brothers, Molly Ivins, Howard Zinn, Bertrand Russell, Amy Goodman, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Victor Wallis, Naomi Klein, Lewis Lapham, Thich Nhat Hann, Sulak Sivaraksa, the Dalai Lama, Vandana Shiva, and so many others.

Like Maya Angelou, I know “Why The Caged Bird Sings.” I know that the meaning of life is learning and service. And I give thanks for friends like Toni Snow and Lewis Randa, who help me keep the faith and keep on truckin’, as a Compassionate Peacemaker and global citizen, committed to Universal Brother-Sisterhood.

Note from Kathie MM: Please share with people on your email lists Stefan’s inspiring story of his journey to peace activism-and send us your own story for publication on engaging peace. Many families, many communities, include peace activists who go about the business of making the world a safer more just and human place. Share the stories.

You don’t have to be Martin Luther King, Jr.

Posted on October 22, 2018October 22, 2018 by kathiemm

by Kathie MM

In my years of preparing and teaching seminars in Family Violence and the Psychology of War and Peace at Boston University, I learned a lot about moral disengagement (the kinds of thinking that allow people to tolerate and promote violent and inhumane behavior) and moral engagement (involvement in behavior that promotes humanity, peace, and justice, even when doing so is unpopular and costly). Most of you know the names of some of the best-known models of moral engagement—e.g., Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Theresa, Howard Zinn.

Rejoice! There are thousands of less well-known people who live lives of moral engagement. I bet you’ve encountered a few in your own life. One such individual I know is Lewis Randa , who will be leading a new Stonewalk on October 24, 2018. Under his leadership, volunteers will unearth a memorial stone for Victims of Violence at its present location at the Peace Abbey in Sherborn, MA, and pull it, using human power alone, on a caisson to the September 11th Labyrinth at Boston College.

Ideally, a democracy should encourage morally engaged leaders like Lewis to flourish, to inspire, and to promote positive change. To improve our own struggling democracy, more people need to engage morally in the task of finding and supporting reforms and reformers at the most basic political levels in their communities, while doing their best to evaluate the characters and commitments of politicians who have reached, by hook or by crook, higher office.

Moral engagement may not be common at the top, but it is not absent either. The good news is that to help make your community, your country, and the environment better, you don’t have to be a martyr, you don’t have to help pull the caisson from Sherborn to Boston (although that would certainly show engagement!), and you don’t have to be MLK. However, there are things you can do. How about getting together with other reform-minded people and searching for ways to encourage morally engaged leaders to run for office–and win? Meanwhile, you can help get out the vote November 6.

When the Absurd Speaks Truth, Part 2

Posted on September 10, 2018March 9, 2021 by kathiemm

by Stefan Schindler

American belief in American superiority was, and remains, such an elephantiastical delusion – “a cross-fertilization of ignorance” – that most of what politicians, the military and the mainstream media say to the American people about the purpose and process of American war-making was, and remains, “psychotic vaudeville.”

Michael Herr did not have to be in Vietnam from 1967 through 1968, but he chose to go; and his memoir, Dispatches, is a scorching dispatch from death. “Conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it, all it could do was take the most profound event of the American decade and turn it into a communications pudding.”

Bleary soldiers and sweat-stained reporters “were all studying the same thing, and if you got killed you couldn’t graduate.”

Combat soldiers in Vietnam, mostly drafted, uniformly thought that correspondents were crazy for choosing to be there. And yet, for the most part, there was enormous respect on both sides. Living and dying together, in the worst of all possible worlds, made for some mighty fine tenderness in between the horrors of combat, and often in the midst of it.

…………………………………………………………………………

“Oh man, you got to be kidding me. You guys asked to come here?”

“Sure”

“How long do you have to stay?”

“As long as we want.”

“Wish I could stay as long as I want,” the Marine called Love Child said. “I’d been home las’ March.”

“When did you get here?” I asked.

“Las’ March.”

…………………………………………………………………………

Robert “Blowtorch” Komer was chief of the rural pacification program. “If William Blake had ‘reported’ to him that he’d seen angels in the trees, Komer would have tried to talk him out of it. Failing there, he’d have ordered defoliation.”

“There was such a dense concentration of American energy there, American and essentially adolescent, if that energy could have been channeled into anything more than noise, waste and pain it would have lighted up Indochina for a thousand years.”

“Stay cool,” “good luck,” “right on,” “keep your shit together, motherfucker” – there were a thousand ways to say goodbye when parting, and it happened every time. Most muttered the words. Some just gave you the look. But it was always the same. “It was like telling someone going out in a storm not to get any on him, it was the same as saying, ‘Gee, I hope you don’t get killed or wounded or see anything that drives you insane.’”

1968.“The death of Martin Luther King intruded on the war in a way that no other outside event had ever done.” I’ll leave it to you to figure that one out. Just think race relations, then and now.

By the end of 1968, the lies and lunacy of the war fused so completely with heroin addiction and racial tension that one could not speak truthfully of an effective American fighting force. Despite President Nixon’s continuation of the war for another five years, the American army in Vietnam was disintegrating.

Nixon took credit for ending the war, but soldiers in revolt had already made that decision, no longer willing to fight and die for a parasitic nightmare conjured into being by men who thought themselves independent, invulnerable, god-like, better than the rest of us, and for whom now, even today, we must not cease to pray, in the hope that they will come down off of their throne, bring the troops home, leave others alone, and join the community of the sane and decent.

Note from KMM: What similarities do you see between circumstances in the US during the Vietnam/Indochina war and the US today? Do you get any inspiration from the glimpse Stefan has provided into America’s “Vietnam War” as seen through the eyes of Michael Herr? Do you think, as Stefan and others do, that America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan constitute a Second Vietnam War (this time in the Middle East) — equally lie-launched, unjust, morally reprehensible, and self-defeating? For further edification, see Stefan’s short, illustrated, reader-friendly, paperback book: America’s Indochina Holocaust: The History and Global Matrix of The Vietnam War and Nick Turse’s book: Kill Anything that Moves. Also think about what drones and nuclear weapons can do today in the wrong hands–and think very, very carefully about who the wrong hands are if what we want is a world of peace, a world of social justice, a world. Finally, ask yourself this question: “What can I do in November to help end today’s and tomorrow’s Vietnam wars?”