MLK on Viet Nam war Dr. King accurately pinpointed the connection between the war that the US government was waging abroad and the lack of resources being allocated to marginalized American citizens. His commentary, excerpted below, eerily foreshadows what is happening today: …I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such. Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.... Right now, the US government is involved in multiple military operations on multiple fronts across the world. The people who suffer the consequences of these wars and operations, both at home and abroad, are people who are already marginalized within their communities.
Posted on: Tue, 20 Jan 2015 09:24:18 +0000
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