Grace Lee Boggs on King’s Legacy of Change:
In the last three years of his life, confronted by the catastrophe of the Vietnam War and urban rebellions, King recognized that “the war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit. We are on the wrong side of a world revolution because we refuse to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.”
“We have come to value things more than people,” he said. “Our technological development has outrun our spiritual development. We have lost our sense of community, of interconnection and participation.”
In order to get on the right side of that revolution, King said that as a nation America must undergo a radical revolution of values against the giant triad of racism, materialism and militarism.
“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.”
The urban rebellions had also made King acutely aware of the need of young people for community and participation. “This generation,” he said, “is engaged in a cold war with the earlier generation. It is not the familiar and normal hostility of the young groping for independence. It 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,” the love that is ready to go to any length to restore community.
Boggs reminds us that we can all take responsibility for becoming part of the solution by cultivating our human sensibilities.
Amen.
4 Comments
Great post Doug. I am not old enough to remember The Vietnam War. My Father was there. I have only came upon these ideas recently with the invasion of Iraq. I don’t know how we can live our lives and tell another culture that their’s is wrong. Americans innability to understand the reasons why other cultures do what they do seems to be the problem. We can hear this over and over with our governments tag words used to describe the war in Iraq. If our government doesn’t get it, how can we expect the people to get it. When you try to take away a peoples culture, they naturally revolt. I know I would. Once again, thanks for the post
Great Post Doug! Thanks for remembering the legacy of Dr. King. As a Southerner, I feel his importance to America can’t be understated.
While I was reading this MLK quote “The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.” In the context of your blog, I substituted “Sage-on-the-stage teacher’s” for “The Western”. That’s the impact of his thought on education. This arrogance is not just. Which makes the next quote more thought provoking.
“The urban rebellions had also made King acutely aware of the need of young people for community and participation. “This generation,” he said, “is engaged in a cold war with the earlier generation. It is not the familiar and normal hostility of the young groping for independence. It has a new quality of bitter antagonism and confused anger which suggests basic values are being contested.”
Bitter antagonism and confused anger – WOW! – that suggest basic values are being contested. YES! It’s the basic epistemology difference between teachers and students.
hmmm
My solution would be teach ‘HOW to learn’ before, or at the same time that we teach ‘WHAT to learn’. Demystify (Levine term) the process. Teachers, explain yourselves! Students, wake up and express yourselves!
My favorite King Day speech – http://www.djpauledge.com/wewillnotbesilenced/index_firstmovie.html
– Carp! I hadn’t seen Charlie Wilson’s War the first time I saw this. Explains alot.
Anyway, keep rockin and thanks for the thought provoking post.
Woody & Newman – yes, respecting multiple points of view is a value that we need to promote in public discourse. I conduct a constant commentary on the talk in the classroom with my students – to help them “see” what I’m thinking, and I encourage them to do the same.
People often forget – whether selectively or simply because they don’t know – that the last three years of Dr. King’s life were transformative years. He was making a shift that many found to be an unfavorable departure from his “I Have A Dream” days. Thank you for sharing.
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