King's Day...

and other things
on my mind

It’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and, while I consider Dr. King the most effective, progressive leader of my lifetime, my thoughts are only briefly on him, focused instead on a radio show that I’m going to guest on in Chicago on Saturday, the 23rd. Host Michael James, whose business card identifies him as an activist and an entrepreneur, is a former SDS member and co-owner, with Katie Hogan, of Rogers Park’s legendary Heartland Café. It’s worth noting, as an aside here, that SDS was not only basically correct in its political analysis and righteous in its fury, but also entrepreneurial to the core. There was not a soul running or sympathizing with SDS who was not themselves capable of falling out of line at any given moment.

Anyway, Michael wants a little summary of what I want to talk about. He will, he says, do his homework on whatever subject I choose. But that won’t be necessary. There’s nothing I want to talk about that he hasn’t thought about himself. There’s a high probability that we will talk about Chicago’s 1983 mayoral race, because the show originates at the Heartland Café on the city’s Northside, and because I am Bernie Epton’s son and because there is always more to say about that election and the people who made it what it was..

Nevertheless, it seems reasonable to outline some other things to talk about. Here’s a list:

1. Politically, the real dangers of this moment are more compelling, lethal and closer to overwhelming, than were IMO the challenges of any other decade of my adult life.

2. Poverty and the failure of democratic institutions, like the public schools and mass transit, affect a larger number of people more severely than ever before.

3. Climate change, militarized agendas, market health care and the socialized liabilities of private capital are poised to sicken, maim, wound and kill more people in a single century than the total sickened and killed by similar means in the entire history of the world.

4. Inevitably, consider also the accuracy of the previous statements.

5. The people alive now, especially people under, say, forty years old, can not only stop the looming catastrophe, they can be the force that ushers in a global Golden Age.

6. What is there that we can offer from the perspective of those of us who once believed we would be the agents of some sort of similarly creative and humane epoch?

Also, time permitting, what might we say about the collapse of mainstream journalism enterprises, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the meaning of life?

From 1993 to very nearly the last day of 1999, Marrianne McMullen and I ran the Dayton Voice, aka Impact Weekly. In combining so much life and so much love, at least for me, the mini-decade of my life largely defined by my association with the Voice and my colleagues there and the whole city of Dayton, OH stands out in memory as seven fruitful and creative and satisfying years.

Every Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, the Voice would run a graphic image of King on the front page and excerpt one of his speeches. Here’s a brief quote from one of those speeches:

“It’s one of the strangest things that all the great military geniuses of the world have talked about peace. The conquerors of old who came killing in pursuit of peace, Alexander, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, and Napoleon, were akin in seeking a peaceful world order. If you will read Mein Kampf closely enough, you will discover that Hitler contended that everything he did in Germany was for peace. And the leaders of the world today talk eloquently about peace. Every time we drop our bombs in North Vietnam, President Johnson talks eloquently about peace. What is the problem? They are talking about peace as a distant goal, as an end we seek, but one day we must admit that peace is not merely a distant goal we seek, but that it is a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means. All of this is saying that, in the final analysis, means and ends must cohere because the end is preexistent in the means, and ultimately destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends.”
Martin Luther King, Jr., “A Christmas Sermon On Peace”
Delivered at Ebenezer Baptist Church, December 1967

Nonviolence: A Good Idea At The Time?

A devoted friend of this blog sent me a link to LivingNonviolence. Margaret has been doing that--living nonviolence--for years, all her adult life, probably, and more. She's taken her skills and shared them with people in Central America, and people in our own country. She is a child of Rosa Parks and Gandhi and (I, a Jew, blush to say it) Jesus. Like Sandy Dennis in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Margaret has a kind of "quiet, noisy intensity" that you can't miss and can't easily describe.

I've always, mostly, sort of aspired to living nonviolence. But I've never felt capable of living "in" it. Still, I can't imagine a set of human values superior to those that are central to the idea of nonviolence (though the concept itself does not require a notion like superiority).

So when Margaret sent the link, I followed it. Not right away, but I did it. This morning.

The site is great. A team of folks, diverse in perspective, background and circumstance, produces it. A variety of writers, videographers and other artists generate materials for the site. And the site conveys a sense to me that living nonviolence is a different sort of thing than living nonviolently, which seems to be a more passive stance.

I watched a beautiful video called "What If." It's a substantial piece, full of important information and perspective, and challenge to all of us. But as I watched, I couldn't stop thinking that maybe Nonviolence, despite its long history, will turn out to be, like Capitalism, nothing more than a good idea at the time.

Of course, nothing is written in stone. Even capitalism might have been saved, I suppose. But, maybe nonviolence has a central problem that it has not yet overcome.

I fear that people who love nonviolence do not know how to speak to those who have accommodated themselves to it. Violence is a terrible thing, yes. But it is also exciting. And in our DNA.

No strategy to save the world with nonviolence as a principle tool will succeed without acknowledging the appeal of violence. I don’t know this. I simply fear it. And if it is true, that violence is in our blood and in our bones, no appeal to violence that simply dwells on the beauty of the thought will work.