We’ve ignored King on war

The Spokesman-Review - On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Monday, hundreds of people will gather, greet friends, hear inspiring words, walk Spokane streets together and promote racial and community harmony. It’s a genuine community event, but some of us experience it more personally because our lives, faith perspectives and worldviews were transformed by the life and death of Dr. King.

Jimmy Carter, a former commander-in-chief, said, when he received the Peace Prize in 2002, "War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children."

Of course, Dr. King's Nobel lecture is filled with memorable lines. It's incomprehensible to me that Obama could ignore or contradict so many great quotes in his own speech, although we're accustomed to lip service to King's memory from apologists for war.

A few lines from King's 1964 Nobel lecture, almost three years before he powerfully and specifically condemned the Vietnam War:

"This problem of spiritual and moral lag ... expresses itself in three larger problems which grow out of man's ethical infantilism. Each of these problems, while appearing to be separate and isolated, is inextricably bound to the other. I refer to racial injustice, poverty, and war.

"... (W)ar is obsolete. There may have been a time when war served as a negative good by preventing the spread and growth of an evil force, but the destructive power of modern weapons eliminated even the possibility that war may serve as a negative good. If we assume that life is worth living and that man has a right to survive, then we must find an alternative to war."

It's easy to name a piece of street for Dr. King. It's difficult to see his war criticism as anything less than prophetic.

The challenge on MLK Day 2010 is to accept the fact that we have dodged the part of his example intended for us, comfortable Americans who made war and violence our default choices. To honor Dr. King, we have to change, and we have to take President Obama with us. Read more.