Kathy Kelly 20 January 2014. Posted in News
Martin
Luther King: A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on
military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual
death.
THIS
MONTH, from Atlanta, GA, the King Center announced its "Choose
Nonviolence" campaign, a call on people to incorporate the symbolism of
bell-ringing into their Martin Luther King Holiday observance, as a means of
showing their commitment to Dr. King's value of nonviolence in resolving
terrible issues of inequality, discrimination and poverty here at home. The call was heard in Kabul, Afghanistan.
On
the same day they learned of the King Center's call, the young members of the
Afghan Peace Volunteers, in a home I was sharing with them in Kabul, were
grieving the fresh news of seven Afghan children and their mother, killed in
the night during a US aerial attack - part of a battle in the Siahgird district
of the Parwan province. The outrage, grief, loss and pain felt in Siahgird were
echoed, horribly, in other parts of Afghanistan during a very violent
week.
My
young friends, ever inspired by Dr. King's message, prepared a Dr. King Day
observance as they shared bread and tea for breakfast. They talked about the
futility of war and the predictable cycles of revenge that are caused every
time someone is killed. Then they made a
poster listing each of the killings they had learned of in the previous seven
days.
They
didn't have a bell, and they didn’t have the money to buy one. So Zekerullah
set to work with a bucket, a spoon and a rope, and made something approximating
a bell. In the APV courtyard, an
enlarged vinyl poster of Dr. King covers half of one wall, opposite another
poster of Gandhi and Khan Abdul Gaffir Khan, the "Muslim Gandhi" who
led Pathan tribes in the nonviolent Khudai Khidmatgar colonial independence
movement to resist the British Empire. Zekerullah's makeshift "bell' was
suspended next to King's poster. Several
dozen friends joined the APVs as we listened to rattles rather than pealing
bells. The poster listing the week's death toll was held aloft and read aloud.
They
read:
"January
15, 2014: 7 children, one woman, Siahgird district of Parwan, killed by the
US/NATO. January 15, 2014, 16 Taliban
militants, killed by Afghan police, army and intelligence operatives across
seven regions, Parwan, Baghlan, Kunduz, Kandahar, Zabul, Logar, and
Paktiya. January 12, 2014: 1 police
academy student and one academy staff member, killed by a Taliban suicide
bomber in Kabul on the road to Jalalabad.
Jan 9, 2014: 1 four year old boy killed in Helmand, by NATO. Jan 9, 2014: 7 people, several of them
police, killed in Helmand by unknown suicide bombers. January 7, 2014: 16 militants killed by
Afghan security forces in Nangarhar, Logar, Ghanzi, Pakitya, Heart and
Nimroz."
We
couldn't know, then, that within two days news would come, with a Taliban
announcement claiming responsibility, of 21 people, 13 foreigners and eight
Afghans, killed while dining in, or guarding, a Kabul restaurant. The Taliban
said that the attack was in retaliation for the seven children killed in the
airstrike in Parwan.
Week
after bloody week, the chart of killings lengthens. And in Afghanistan, while war rages, a
million children are estimated to suffer from acute malnourishment as the
country faces a worsening hunger crisis.
This
Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, we can and should remember the dream Dr. King
announced before the Lincoln Memorial, the dream he did so much to accomplish,
remembering his call (as the King Center asks) for nonviolent solutions to
desperate concerns of discrimination and inequality within the US But we shouldn't let ourselves forget the
full extent of Dr. King's vision, the urgent tasks he urgently set us to
fulfill on his behalf, so many of them left unfinished nearly forty-six years
after he was taken from us. One year to
the day before his assassination, he said:
...
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."... The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach
others and nothing to learn from them is not just.
A
true revolution of values will lay hand 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 our nation's homes with orphans
and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples
normally humane, of sending men 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.
We
must never forget the full range of Dr. King's vision, nor the full tragedy of
the world he sought to heal, nor the revolutionary spirit which he saw as our
only hope of achieving his vision - making do with everything we have to try to
keep freedom ringing, despite the pervasiveness of the evils that beset us, and
a world that needs vigorous effort to save it from addictions to tyranny and
violence practiced by reckless elites.
“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 reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will
take precedence over the pursuit of war.”
Kathy
Kelly ( Kathy@vcnv.org) co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence
(vcnv.org) While in Kabul, she was a guest of the Afghan Peace Volunteers
(ourjourneytosmile.com) All quotations are taken from Dr. King’s speech given
at the Riverside Church on April 4, 1967
Source:
WarIsACrime.org
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