A TRAGIC DEATH WISH GRANTED

 

©Wendell Griffen 2024

Little Rock, Arkansas

 

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 when he urged the United States to end its war in Vietnam.

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. [Martin Luther King Jr., A Time to Break Silence – Beyond Vietnam (A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr, edited by James Melvin Washington, HarperOne, p. 241, italics added)

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, and 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” that 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 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 Fierce Urgency of Prophetic Hope, Judson Press, 2017, pp. 64-65] 

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 Black, Latino, Asian, and women, for votes while refusing to stop the carnage and suffering caused by Israeli soldiers in Gaza and U.S. police in the 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 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.”