As I listened to and watched PBS Monday night (“Citizen King”), and heard MLK’s words, I was reminded of how many of his supporters gave hinm a hard time for coming out against Vietnam, and said to him “Stick to Civil Rights”. To that King replied:
“I’ve worked too lonng and too hard to fight against segregation to end up segregating my MORAL concerns. I’m NOT going to do that”
and “Injustice ANYWHERE is a threat to justice EVERYWHERE”.
King recognized that there’s a problem with violence. It begets violence. It begets terrorism, and we keep fighting fire with more fire. Instead of attacking the roots of the problem, we attack the causes, and create more terrorists. 5 and 10 years from now, when some of the children of Afganistan and Iraq are older and begin forming and releasing and expressing their attitudes, what is their image of the US? We hear very little talk about that; it is not a part of our “theories” of why WE are right. Violence begets violence. And people keep on NOT GETTING IT.
People say “They only understand violence”. No, we understand the same thing. WE ONLY understand violence. It’s always our fallback, always rushing in to STOP all of the talk and “TAKE ACTION’. It’s revealing to see that when we say “TAKE ACTION” we always mean war. Violence. ACTION. King taught otherwise. Jesus taught otherwise. Gandhi said :
“I’m not advocating ‘passive’ anything. Non-violent DIRECT ACTION”.
While I have not yet had the pleasure to read all your entries, this one did catch my eye.
It speaks truth, I have talked about it personally, blogged about it, spoke in public about it. You cannot remove terrorism until you remove its root causes. It is that simple. You must turn it off at the source, and understand why people turn to it. Number one being injustice.
Excellent blog.