King Day

“It’s inevitable that we’ve got to bring out the question of the tragic mix-up in priorities. We are spending all of this money for death and destruction, and not nearly enough money for life and constructive development… When the guns of war become a national obsession, social needs inevitably suffer.” – Dr. Martin Luther King

Dr. King was born in 1929 and would have been 91 this year if not for his tragic assassination in 1968.  Anne Frank was born five months later in Frankfurt, Germany.

I have some first-hand memories of Dr. King in the news while he was still alive (I was 14 years old when King was shot), but Frank always seemed consigned to the history books.  To Gen X and Millennials, both persons must seem like vestiges of some distant past  - historical figures taught in school and books but far removed from present-day life.

The still-living and very-much-active alto saxophonist Marshall Allen was already five years old when King and Frank were born, and I've previously posted videos here of Allen tearing it up with the Sun Ra Arkestra.  They're scheduled to play a show at the Philadelphia Museum of Fine Arts on the 31st and New York's Town Hall on March 4.  He has a European tour scheduled for April and May, and to repeat, he was five years old when Dr. King and Anne Frank were born.

Barbara Walters was also born in 1929.  So was actor Max von Sydow, who I just saw in the Scorsese film Shutter Island.  So were actors Christopher Plummer,  Bob Newhart and Ed Asner.  Sure, they're all old, but hardly shadowy figures from the history books.

Which is all to say that Dr. King's words are more than just sage advise from an historical figure but still hold relevancy today.  In his latter years, Dr. King increasingly spoke about the intersectionality of racism, economic inequality, and war, or as he put it, the "three evils" - the evil of racism, the evil of poverty, and the evil of war.  

As Ibram X. Kendi (How To Be An Anti-Racist) describes it today, racist policies deny opportunities for economic self-sufficiency to certain groups, which results in an ample supply of volunteers for the armed forces to fight in our wars without the need for a draft.  It should be noted that if a draft were necessary, there would likely be an energetic protest movement and possible disruption to the powers that be. So the powerful directly benefit from the racist policies that ultimately provide ready and willing soldiers, and the cycle perpetuates itself, just as Dr. King saw it in the 1960s.  

Same thing, different century.  

We are each of us significantly more likely to become homeless than to become billionaires, so we all, regardless of race, color, or creed, should develop a sense of class solidarity and stop glorifying our oppressors.