Why this Redneck will Always Honor Dr. King

Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence

Delivered 4 April 1967, Riverside Church, New York City

"And some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation's history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movements and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us."


I was 17 when he gave this speech and almost completely oblivious to the civil rights struggle. Although I had lived in the deep south when my dad was in the Army it was as remote from my suburban world as was Africa, or indeed, Washington D.C. (We used to joke in Arlington that the Potomac was the widest river in the world...) and poverty was only something my parents recalled from the thirties. I'm sure Dr. King's concern for young white suburban jerks was almost as remote, but his reaching out beyond his world caught me up and showed me for the first time the distance between what I had been taught, in school and in church, and the reality of America in the world. Vietnam chewed up a lot of my cohort and would have taken many more without Dr. King. Talk about standing athwart history and yelling "Stop!"

I am more embarrassed than ashamed of the casual racism of my youth, because I know it was out of ignorance, and I do know the difference between that and real hatred that I would come to see later. I always detested sports, but one of my first  heros was Muhammed Ali, who put into words ("I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Congs") that even I could grasp, what Dr. King was saying so eloquently that was lost my younger self. Later I would learn about Paul Robeson's lonely struggle against the hidden side of the world I took for granted, and Malcolm X speaking reality to black men, but really to all men who want to be truly free. Everyone owes thanks to the brave men and women of the Civil Rights Movement. Like it or not, fellow crackers,  Black History IS American History.

I'm STILL feeling a draft

Since I was about eighteen I've wondered why the draft was limited to young men. In a real democracy at war, it seems everyone that was mentally and physically able should serve and that all defence industries would be nationalized for the duration. Aside from basic fairness it would be a powerful incentive to avoid unnecessary wars. A fifty-something overweight and out-of-shape person such as myself probably wouldn't do too well hiking around Afganistan with an eighty pound pack, but we could drive trucks and move supplies and such. A lot of people have commented that most Americans have not been at all inconvenienced by the Iraq police action and would tend to be much less aggressive if they knew they would be directly involved.
I've long been interested in how black people were treated in the Armed forces - how they could fight for "democracy" when they were systematically and offically segregated in civilian life and also in the services, for whatever reasons. I admit my original interest was racist - I noticed that we had not won a war since the services were integrated and I didn't believe it was coincidental, but I saw a teevee documentary recently about ww2 in Europe, that mentioned an all-black logistics unit supplying Patton, and the pieces started to come together. Patton was continuosly bogged down driving toward Germany by lack of fuel which fit well with my original, obviously racist, hypothesis that blacks may have been less than enthusiastic about getting killed rushing unarmed and probably lightly escorted tankers in service to the Man in a dangerously fluid and undefined front for two dollars a day. I'm sure there were many with a stong sense of duty that could overlook the irony in being essentially slaves fighting for democracy, but I would have had a strong attitude problem with segregation eighty years after the civil war. We were very fortunate that black people were so patient and forebearing for so long, and I believe that their experiences in the war contributed to the acceleration of the civil rights movement in the 50's and 60's.
Without a draft, logistics and support have become almost prohibitivly expensive. Soldiers still get paid diddly, but this helps explain why privatised war is ruinously expensive and inefficient and why we will never win another war bigger and more distant than Grenada.