On April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. called on the United States to lead the world in what he termed “a radical revolution of values” during a speech at Riverside Church in New York City. He urged the United States to end its war in Vietnam.
Wendell Griffen
A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling … homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of peoples normally humane, of sending (people) home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from re-ordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war.
King was shot to death one year after he spoke those words. Since his death on April 4, 1968, the nation that pretends to honor his life and ministry has designed, manufactured, produced, merchandised, marketed and practiced warfare, within its borders and throughout the world. Every U.S. president since King’s death (Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden), presided over a political, commercial, cultural and social system that made the United States the world’s leading designer, merchant and agent of militarized death.
“The horrible consequences of the ‘tragic death wish’ King warned about are clear.”
The horrible consequences of the “tragic death wish” King warned about are clear. In Gaza, the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Israel, Ukraine, Haiti, Sudan, Yemen, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, Iraq, South and Central America, in communities throughout the United States and elsewhere, U.S. weapons and subsidized wars have filled homes with orphans and widows, dismembered and deranged war victims and veterans, and left people suffering from our national addiction to the insanity of violence.
In 2017 I wrote:
The mood and conduct of U.S. leaders and the public at large, including religious leaders, since King’s assassination shows that we have not embraced the “radical revolution of values” he proclaimed. Instead of rejecting and weakening the giant triplets of racism, militarism and materialism King warned about, the U.S. nourished, bred and multiplied them. By rejecting King’s values while pretending to venerate him as our greatest prophet, we not only re-assassinate King, we also destroy ourselves and risk forfeiting any moral authority we claim as agents for peace, justice and truth in the world. Sooner or later, people who feed a death wish find a way to destroy themselves.
The proof that we found a way to destroy ourselves is monstrously clear. The two leading contenders in the current U.S. presidential campaign spent their political careers promoting racism, militarism and materialism.
Donald Trump’s vicious idiocy, unbridled bigotry and sociopathic dishonesty need no explanation. Joe Biden has cheered for every military adventure the United States has taken, including the baseless wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel’s genocidal actions against Palestinians in Gaza, and militarized policing across the United States.
Trump’s sociopathic dishonesty is notorious. But Biden’s dishonesty is bottomed on hypocrisy, as proved by the way he panders to Blacks, Latinos, Asians and women for votes while refusing to stop the carnage and suffering caused by Israeli soldiers in Gaza and U.S. police in this country.
The U.S. democracy is dying. Sensitive people see, hear, feel and know the signs of its terminal illness. The words from Biden, Trump and their political, commercial and cultural cronies are the death rattle. We are well into a death watch.
We can lament, protest and grieve the suffering and growing signs of approaching death, but our nation will not be consoled. We invited this grim fate. We chose leaders who rejected King’s plea for a radical revolution of values, pimped his name and memory and pretended to venerate him.
The only thing that remains is for the patient — democracy — to suffer a painful and grotesque death.
Then political, commercial, religious and cultural undertakers will collect the remains, try to make them presentable and preside over funeral proceedings they will, falsely, call governance. Their speeches will amount to versions of a death certificate. And the nation called the United States will be the pathetic, but not pitiable, survivor of a 250-year terminal illness that King presciently called “a tragic death wish.”
Wendell Griffen serves as pastor of New Millennium Baptist Church in Little Rock, Ark., and is a retired state judge.