Friday, February 1, 2008

John McCain/Martin Luther King

In the flurry of campaign activity leading up to "Super Tuesday," I was particularly struck by a recent speech given by John McCain to a group of supporters in Florida:

"This is a tough war we're in. It's not going to be over right away. There's going to be other wars. ...I'm sorry to tell you, there's going to be other wars. We will never surrender but there will be other wars." -- John McCain, Polk City, Florida, 1/27/08

The Senator's words alone are chilling enough, but the video somehow makes his statements all the more frightening:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZCISY40qns

Meanwhile, I happened to be in downtown San Francisco with my son during the recent three day weekend honoring Dr. Martin Luther King's birthday. We toured the MLK memorial at Yerba Buena Gardens, which features a number of memorable quotes from Dr. King. The one that really struck me was the following:

"Through our scientific genius, we have made this world a neighborhood; now, through our moral and spiritual development, we must make of it a brotherhood. In a real sense, we must learn to live together as brothers, or we will perish together as fools." -- Martin Luther King, Jr.

It's clear from their words, that the world views of these two men couldn't be further apart. And in the end, world view amounts to nearly everything. It's what forms us, how we filter information, and how we draw conclusions.

McCain's viewpoint is like that of so many in his political party -- "My way or the highway, you're either with us or against us." It is a perspective of the past, of simplistically defined "evil-doers," of subjugation through might, and of judgmental deities smiling down on the ultimate victor. I am not unsympathetic to McCain's life experiences. Shot down over North Vietnam in 1967, he was beaten and spat upon after parachuting into enemy territory. He spent over five years in a North Vietnamese prison, and was tortured and beaten during much of that time.

But having grown up in the segregated south of the United States, King was also no stranger to violence and oppression. He had seen lynchings, church burnings, and the raw hatred in the eyes of men who poured coffee and food over the heads of southern black diners simply because they had the audacity to sit at a counter labeled "whites only." And yet he came to very different conclusions as to the world's problems. Even though he delivered the above speech over 40 years ago, King clearly recognized the reality of the era that we had already entered into. We no longer live in a world of small and isolated villages, where conflicts can we resolved by throwing spears and swinging swords. We are now interconnected within hours by air, within minutes by nuclear missile, and within milliseconds by the Internet.

The Bush/McCain "war against terror" can never be won until the root cause of such conflicts is addressed. We live in a time where conflicts are being fought with homemade bombs and forty-dollar cell phone triggers, and where skyscrapers are brought down with dime-store box cutters. It's no longer an option to imagine that we can somehow battle others into submission through sheer military might.

Unless we can somehow see beyond the narrow world view of men such as Bush and McCain (and their same ilk on the other side), and find common ground toward common cause, we may truly find ourselves fulfilling King's grim prophecy -- to "perish together as fools." And leave only such pathetic and bellicose videos as our memorial.

1 comment:

Who Am I? said...

Steve, POST!

I don't think the ideals presented by either men are mutually exclusive. You can want King's world and work for it and still recognize there are others that are going to fight against you and make it hard for that vision to ever come to pass. The old you can still die on the sword adage applies. I want rainbows and butterflies, too. But that doesn't mean others will let me have them.