LIVING FOR CHANGE

Recapture Mlk’s Radical Revolutionary Spirit

By Grace Lee Boggs

Michigan Citizen, April 1-7, 2007

We can only end the illegal, immoral and catastrophic war in the Middle East by building a new movement to create a more just, more caring and more sustainable America.

Until our opposition to the war is linked to a cultural revolution to build a new America, we will be dependent on politicians to do the “right thing.”

The war in Southeast Asia was finally brought to an end in 1975 because the civil rights, Black Power, women’s, Native. Chicano, Asian-American and ecological movements were creating a cultural revolution at home.

In the last three years of his life MLK was challenging Americans to build a new movement based on the connection between the violence in Vietnam and the violence exploding “in our dying cities.”

Ever since Watts erupted in August 1965, King had recognized that the urban rebellions of black youth were not only against racism but also against a culture which valued things more than people.

That is why he called for a radical revolution in our values and a struggle against the giant triplets of racism, militarism and materialism in his April 4, 1967 “Time to Break the Silence” speech.

“The war in Vietnam,” he said,” is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit.”

“Our technological development has outrun our spiritual development. We have lost our sense of community, of interconnection and participation.”

“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 hands on the world order and say of war: ‘This way of settling differences is not just.’ A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

Young people were especially alienated by our materialistic and militaristic culture.

This generation, he said, “is engaged in a cold war with the earlier generation, which is not the familiar and normal hostility of the young groping for independence but has a new quality of bitter antagonism and confused anger which suggests basic values are being contested.

“The source of this alienation is that our society has made material growth and technological advance an end in itself, robbing people of participation, so that human beings become smaller while their works become bigger.”

The way to overcome this alienation, he said, is by changing our priorities. Instead of pursuing economic productivity, we need to expand our uniquely human powers, especially our capacity for Agape which is the Love that is ready to go to any length to restore community.

“We can learn its practical meaning from the young people who joined the civil rights movement, putting middle class values of wealth and careers in second place… putting on overalls to work in the isolated rural South because they felt the need for more direct ways of learning that would strengthen both society and themselves.”

What we need now” in our dying cities,” King said, are ways to provide young people with similar opportunities to engage in self-transforming and structure-transforming direct action.”

How do we recapture this radical revolutionary spirit of MLK?

We can begin discussing this question and building this movement at the Transforming Grief into Hope gathering on Saturday, April 21, from 3:30-6 pm. at the Williams Community Center, 8432 Rosa Parks Blvd. in the heart of the neighborhood where the 1967 Rebellion erupted.

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