Jump-starting a movement
10/10/2011

Disband these two evils (corporate rule and militarism) and resources immediately become available for a host of positive ends.  For investments in conservation and clean energy (it’s the planet we live on that we’re killing); in education for everyone; in domestic and international aid and development (local, indigenous models, please, not “our way or the highway” models), and state and local banks and lending agencies; in environmental restoration and sustainable communities; in arts and culture and innovation along whatever lines appeal to us—to all of us, an entire planet full of individuals endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.  (If you don’t believe in a Creator, no problem.  The actions and inactions ascribed to this entity would easily inspire a host of atheists, though I personally believe that the misappropriation of God’s name to sanction lie, theft, rape, and murder is blasphemy; can’t blame the Creator for it.)

A return to equality under the law.  That means that governments and corporations that defraud, disenfranchise, kill, torture, rape, and maim are just as liable to the law and vulnerable to prosecution and enforced restitution as less powerful individuals.

Today’s “occupiers” didn’t invent this creed; they’re not the first to hold this vision.  The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., articulated it 45 years ago, in a speech he delivered to a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. ... A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, 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." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. 

The hippies of the ‘60s and ‘70s echoed King’s sentiments with love-ins and peace-ins, as did the punk-rockers of the ‘80s and ‘90s, with head-banging and vitriol.

Prior to King, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us of the dangers of the road we were traveling.  In his famous 1953 “Cross of Iron” speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Eisenhower said that, following World War II:

The way chosen by the United States was plainly marked by a few clear precepts, which govern its conduct in world affairs.
First: No people on earth can be held, as a people, to be enemy, for all humanity shares the common hunger for peace and fellowship and justice.
Second: No nation’s security and well-being can be lastingly achieved in isolation but only in effective cooperation with fellow-nations.
Third: Any nation’s right to form of government and an economic system of its own choosing is inalienable.
Fourth: Any nation’s attempt to dictate to other nations their form of government is indefensible.
And fifth: A nation’s hope of lasting peace cannot be firmly based upon any race in armaments but rather upon just relations and honest understanding with all other nations.

The United States has not only failed to follow its own precepts, it has bankrupted its own citizenry and jeopardized the global welfare by ignoring the five-star general’s additional warning:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.
It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

Clearly, we can do better.  We must do better.  The leader-full movement of unemployed “losers” taking back their country is currently our best hope for the future. They’re not claiming to have all the answers, but they sure have jump-started the conversation. 

God bless them.