In the foggy drizzle just past the Blue Angel speakeasy in black North Gulfport, Mississippi, we saw the stumbling figure in the glow of our van headlights. We decided to stop. The young white soldier from Keesler Air Base was spitting blood as he explained through his inebriation fog someone had taken his gun, beaten him, and dumped him out. He didn't know where he was. He said "take me back," but couldn't tell us where. We drove back to the Blue Angel, but he wouldn't get out of the van. In his haze, he thought we knew where he wanted to go and accused us of playing mind games with him. His belligerence rose as some of us laughed at his unintelligible predicament. We ended up stopping to let him out right in the middle of black North Gulfport, as his agitation was rising into violence.
That happened one steamy night as I was returning with a group of volunteer reading teachers who had been celebrating their teenage students' accomplishments at their headquarters, the "North Gulfport Good Deeds Association." At that time in the mid 60's, Mississippi was not funding public education for blacks. This is one of the overwhelming needs we volunteers were addressing under the leadership of my father-in-law, The Rev. Orlo Kaufman.
I saw no connection at the time between this event and my daytime work as a Bible School teacher in the piney woods just up the highway from North Gulfport. I had ten teenage black girls who were present every morning on time at a rough-sawn table under a large live oak beside the red dirt road. They were children of pine tappers, blacks who cut V's in the bark of long leaf pines of the national forest for the sap to run, which they sold for a pittance to the mill that processed the sap into the turpentine and wholesaled it to paint retailers across the country.
A grandma warned me when I started teaching: "Don't let those girls talk. Make them read the Bible." I couldn't stop their talk. It was about North Gulfport, the Blue Angel and other speakeasies, beatings, escapes, and The Man. I tried to follow Grandma's direction. The girls were obedient, sort of. But I still didn't get it. My father-in-law did, and he explained: "Those girls' families cannot survive on pine tapper pay. Some of them are sent to the speakeasies of North Gulfport to service soldiers and tourists who come from the north to gamble and drink off the coast and visit the speakeasies across the colored line in North Gulfport. These girls haven't gone yet."
I protested, "Isn't that illegal? Mississippi is a dry state, and prostitution is a crime." He replied darkly, "That's why the sheriff of Harrison County, Mississippi, has the highest income of any publicly elected official."
"Including our president?" I demanded. "Absolutely; way more," he said.
At his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in Sweden, Barak Obama dismissed the power of Dr. King's dream of peace, only accepting his message of racial tolerance. Since his Inaugural speech in January 2009, Obama has pursued policies that epitomize King's grim warning in 1967: "When scientific power outruns moral power, we end up with guided missiles and misguided men." He was concerned we would trust drones more than his dream of trusting the moral foundation of our nation.
Our nation is lost in a fog of drone inebriation. We are misguided men stumbling along trying to subdue perceived hatred of us among the world's nations without our moral or scientific moorings. No one has confronted us to disarm us; in fact, we are deathly afraid of being disarmed. While overseas I learned we are now confronted by a worldwide consensus that we are the most dangerous nation on earth, most likely to start or facilitate violent conflict. This happened since we started bombing Iraq.
With virtually unanimous support, even from the Tea Party, Obama has acted upon the weakness that is strong only in its power to destroy. He continues our nation's enormous gamble. There are few political risks for Obama's use of drones in our defense against terrorism. But our own amazingly strong moral and scientific heritage says we are stumbling, armed and dangerous, in a fog of confusion, spending trillions facilitating technologies of death and destruction around the world since Hiroshima.
Dr. King had the answer, but Obama cannot help us listen to it. We must listen on our own. He knew where we as a nation were headed before he died. He gave his life to urge us on a track to true national strength, founded upon the best democratic and Christian ideals to come out of our 1776 revolution.
We as a nation have a right to be proud of our heritage. But we will only find the sorrows of the empires that have expired before us if we continue choosing drones over the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. That seems to be President Obama and the nation's consensus stumbling in incoherent inebriation in the fog of perpetual war.
David Sirota at Salon.com: http://www.salon.com/2013/01/25/actually_obama_does_advocate_perpetual_war/
Norman Solomon's blog:
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/14012-king-i-have-a-dream-obama-i-have-a-drone
"Obama has not ignored King's anti-war legacy. On the contrary, the president has gone out of his way to distort and belittle it.
"In his eleventh month as president -- while escalating the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan, a process that tripled the American troop levels there -- Obama traveled to Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. In his speech, he cast aspersions on the peace advocacy of another Nobel Peace laureate: Martin Luther King Jr.
"The president struck a respectful tone as he whetted the rhetorical knife before twisting. "I know there's nothing weak -- nothing passive -- nothing naive -- in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King," he said, just before swiftly implying that those two advocates of nonviolent direct action were, in fact, passive and naive. "I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people," Obama added.
"The real foundation of the "Arab Spring" was countless workshops and teach ins across Tunisia and Egypt based prominently on research from the Albert Einstein Center
"Moments later, he was straining to justify American warfare: past, present, future. "To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism -- it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason," Obama said. "I raise this point, I begin with this point because in many countries there is a deep ambivalence about military action today, no matter what the cause. And at times, this is joined by a reflexive suspicion of America, the world's sole military superpower."
"Then came the jingo pitch: "Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms."
"Crowing about the moral virtues of making war while accepting a peace prize might seem a bit odd, but Obama's rhetoric was in sync with a key dictum from Orwell: "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past."
"Laboring to denigrate King's anti-war past while boasting about Uncle Sam's past (albeit acknowledging "mistakes," a classic retrospective euphemism for carnage from the vantage point of perpetrators), Obama marshaled his oratory to foreshadow and justify the killing yet to come under his authority."
The Arab Spring did not happen with a sudden spark to ignite the demand for democracy. It was founded with decades of teaching and disciplined drill at university campuses and training camps in nonviolent combat. Gene Sharp, professor emeritus at Dartmouth, contributed American scientific research and wrote the manual on how to destroy a dictatorship and to prevent the rise of a new one, with weapons more powerful than those that tear up skin, flesh, grey matter and bone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Dictatorship_to_Democracy.
In his 80's, he still is active with the organization he helped start, The Albert Einstein Institute
This side has many links to research on the power of nonviolent warfare.
Harvard University Law School has a large department named Program on Negotiation, with volumes of reliable research into how peace is built in human cultures averting the fog and bloody tragedy of violent conflict. Many diplomats worldwide have graduated from this program. It is easily accessible online. Their high school/college curriculum for teaching the science of peace building is the same source I used to teach English at XiHua University in China: http://thirdside.org/
Much of Dr. King's work reflected his belief that Jesus was far more concerned about proper economics than he was about proper prayers. He felt that the solution to the violence in our nation at that time must include addressing the problems of ungodly economics.
A short explanation of Dr. King's nonviolent strategy, its power, and how we as a nation reject his message and his understanding of what makes us a great nation: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/14034-dulling-down-dr-kings-message
Nearly all of Dr. King's recorded speeches are available online, on youtube and other sources. Just use a search engine with words like "Dr. King nonviolence Vietnam economic justice."
David Graber
Hardin, MT 59034
graberdb@gmail.com
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