#474: What Would King Say?

      Had he lived, Martin Luther King, Jr. would have turned 90 this past week.  As the nation celebrates his birthday, it is easy to honor King as a champion of civil rights, perhaps even easy to note that in 2019 America risks losing some of the gains he championed. 

But it is much harder for us to actually honor him as our national prophet--as America’s conscience--because that means honoring all the causes he stood for.  And those causes taken together, have not merely lost ground; they have nearly disappeared from our public discourse. 

Let me survey what King called the “three great evils,” and ask two questions: What would King say now?  And: Who in our public life still speaks for King? 

Racial Injustice.  Most celebrations honoring King focus on him as leader of the civil rights movement.  And surely a key message in his mission was that people be judged not “by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” By 1968 King had witnessed many gains, including the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.  And since then, African-Americans have continued many gains. 

Still, were King alive today he might well say that too often people continue to be judged by the color of their skin, whether in efforts to suppress black votes, or in cases of police shooting unarmed Blacks, or in the rollback of the Voting Rights Act itself. 

And more recently the challenge of accepting people of color has increasingly focused, not only on the descendants of slaves, but also on immigrants and their children (indeed, our first Black president was the son of an immigrant, not the descendant of slaves).  And while King did not face the same issues over immigration that we face now, it’s easy to know what he might say--in fact he already actually said it:

“We may all have come from different ships, but we're in the same boat now."

Indeed, by the end of his career King would be increasingly clear that the evil of racism was not just a problem for U.S. blacks, but for all those oppressed by others:

“In one sense the civil rights movement in the United States is a special American phenomenon which must be understood in the light of American history and dealt with in terms of the American situation. But on another and more important level, what is happening in the United States today is a relatively small part of a world development.”

Looking around today, King might well say we remain far from fulfilling the goal of racial justice for all.

Inequality.  In later years King spoke more and more about economic inequality.  He often called it “poverty,” since up to 1968 the middle class was still gaining in wages and benefits, so it made sense to focus on those below the poverty line.  But since King’s death, the U.S. has seen nearly 50 years of steadily declining real wages even for the middle class, and we now see a wealth gap worse than any time since the great depression of the 1930s.  So when King spoke of poverty, he said:

“Why are there forty million poor people in America? And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth.’ When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy.”

This question of a “broader distribution of wealth” has changed since his death, with fewer below the poverty line but more struggling to make ends meet as wealth has been even more concentrated.  This makes King’s view not less, but even more timely.  Today he would surely repeat these words:

“Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children... God never intended for one group of people to live in superfluous inordinate wealth, while others live in abject deadening poverty.”

War. King lost many supporters and became an even more controversial figure when he campaigned against the Vietnam War.  Even other civil rights leaders felt this was not his role.  But they did not realize that, for King, this was the inevitable result of his own growing vision. 

Once he decided that nonviolence was the key to fighting racism, and once he incorporated the theories of Gandhian nonviolence into his own Christian theology, that naturally altered his views on war, as he moved from a “just war” perspective to pacifism.  He called this his “pilgrimage to nonviolence”:

“I felt that while war could never be a positive good, it could serve as a negative good by preventing the spread and growth of an evil force. War, horrible as it is, might be preferable to surrender to a totalitarian system. But now I believe that the potential destructiveness of modern weapons totally rules out the possibility of war ever again achieving a negative good.”

Indeed, King seemed to know that without a concerted anti-war strategy, the threat of mass destruction would spread.  Today’s worries about North Korea, Iran, and the U.S. abandoning the INF treaty all echo King’s warning:

“Nations are not reducing but rather increasing their arsenals of weapons of mass destruction. The best brains in the highly developed nations of the world are devoted to military technology. The proliferation of nuclear weapons has not been halted…On the contrary, the detonation of an atomic device by the first nonwhite, non-Western, and so-called underdeveloped power, namely the Chinese People’s Republic, opens new vistas of exposure of vast multitudes, the whole of humanity, to insidious terrorization by the ever-present threat of annihilation.”

When accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, King made his rejection of militarism clear:

“I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of nuclear annihilation... I believe that even amid today's mortar bursts and whining bullets, there is still hope for a brighter tomorrow... I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed.”

I have no doubt that he would say matters now have only become worse.  Since 9/11 the U.S. has engaged in multiple, seemingly endless wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere. And unlike the Vietnam era, these wars are not even especially controversial.  In the 1960s a band of public leaders loudly opposed U.S. war policy: King, Robert F. Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, and many others.  In 2019, who are the public leaders opposing our warlike foreign policy? 

Yet our troop deployments and arms sales (not to mention defense pending) far outstrip all other nations.  It is as if Americana have accepted that war is inevitable and peace is impossible. King would disagree:

“World peace through non-violent means is neither absurd nor unattainable. All other methods have failed. Thus we must begin anew. Non-violence is a good starting point.”

For Catholics today, King’s views are important for three reasons. 

First, his views on race, economic inequality, and peace fit almost exactly with Catholic Social Teaching of the last 50 years--especially with the teachings of the last four popes.  You can look it up! 

Second, King agrees with the Church that these three issues are linked:

“We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together…you can’t really get rid of one without getting rid of the others…the whole structure of American life must be changed.”

Third, King’s vision of the contemporary world exactly matches the Catholic vision emerging from Vatican Council II (1962-1965).  The Council saw technological progress as the hallmark of modern life, and praised such progress but offered this caution: technological progress confers new power, but the good use of that power requires a matching progress in wisdom and goodness. 

Here is how King saw the same “moral lag”:

“Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood. But somehow, and in some way, we have got to do this.”

For King, as for Vatican II, this “moral lag” is at the root of what he calls the world’s three great evils:

“This problem of spiritual and moral lag, which constitutes modern man’s chief dilemma, expresses itself in three larger problems which grow out of man’s ethical infantilism. Each of these problems, while appearing to be separate and isolated, is inextricably bound to the other. I refer to racial injustice, poverty, and war.”

And for King, as for Vatican II, the challenge lies in our moral progress catching up to our technological progress:

“Mankind’s survival is dependent upon man’s ability to solve the problems of racial injustice, poverty, and war; the solution of these problems is in turn dependent upon man squaring his moral progress with his scientific progress, and learning the practical art of living in harmony”

Based on his own words, then, King’s voice still speaks to our time, much the way Catholic Social Teaching does.  Taken together, they represent our brightest wisdom and our clearest hope--but who will champion of such vision? 

On a day when many seek to fence in King’s legacy to narrow questions of race, we should rededicate ourselves to his broader cause of waging nonviolent combat against racism, inequality, and militarism. 

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2019

#468: The NFL’s Loyalty Test

  The controversy swirling around the bended knees by NFL players raises issues about our national identity and our commitment to it. 

On Thursday, the Supreme Court Justice picked by Donald Trump spoke to a select audience about defending the First Amendment. Here is what Neil Gorsuch said:

To be worthy of the First Amendment freedoms, we have to all adopt certain civil habits that enable others to enjoy them as well. When it comes to the First Amendment, that means tolerating those who don’t agree with us or those whose ideas upset us, giving others the benefit of the doubt about their motives.

Also Thursday, Tennessee Titans tight end Delanie walker revealed that he and his family had been receiving death threats.  These were apparently how fans responded after he suggested that fans should not come to NFL games if they felt disrespected by player protests.  

These two events reveal the opposite extremes the controversy has surfaced.

It’s tempting to think that the upset over the NFL protests is a mere distraction from the more serious problems facing America.  Certainly, for Trump himself, it is convenient if the public and media fight among themselves over the NFL players rather than focusing their attention on his handling of affairs with North Korea, or his slow response to the crisis in Puerto Rico, or his tax plans.

But in 21^st century America, matters of race are never a “mere distraction.” And this case is above all about race.  But the real and unfortunate distraction has been to pretend that is about something else. So perhaps it is helpful to reflect and clarify on how the controversy about the NFL is a test of loyalty both for Americans and for Christians.

The clarification requires stating some basic facts to clear the air:

First: the NFL players did not introduce politics onto the playing field.  This was done in 2009 when the U.S. government began paying the NFL millions to stage “patriotic” events before each game: color guards, gun salutes, fly-overs—all designed to boost recruiting efforts by whipping up patriotic fervor.  In short, this is government-paid advertizing for the military, and it had the effect of bringing politics onto the NFL’s playing fields.

It’s just silly to complain if the players, understanding that politics is already at work here, decide to take advantage of the situation someone else has created.

Second: the players are not protesting the flag or the anthem.  Colin Kaepernick explicitly said that he meant no disrespect to either, but was in fact protesting the bad treatment of African Americans by police.  One may agree or disagree about the issue of police brutality, but it has nothing to do with either our flag or national anthem.

Third, this is not a protest about soldiers or veterans.  The original protest about police brutality has been transformed, in response to Trump’s “Sons of bitches” attack, into a protest about the First Amendment itself.  In neither instance are the players attacking, objecting to, or showing any disrespect for members of the military.  In fact many protesters are themselves veterans, and many other veterans support them. 

The players did not make the decision to have soldiers on the field, and they should not have to take any responsibility for it.  The players need to be on the field to play the game, but football could continue even if no soldier ever set foot on the gridiron.

Fourth: player salaries have nothing to do with the protests.  Yes, these players are millionaires - -but they are responding in protest to the attacks of someone who is even richer than they are. To allow a billionaire president to make such attacks, and then to claim that his target audience cannot protest because they are rich, is completely inconsistent. 

Some fans are even arguing that the players are “ungrateful” because they want to protest despite being well paid.  But First Amendment rights cannot be bought off; players do not lose those rights when they accept a paycheck, no matter how large.  And since most of them are African-Americans, calling them ungrateful sounds like a new way of calling Black Americans “uppity.”

Bill Russell takes a knee with his Medal of Freedom

Fifth:  Kneeling is not disrespectful.  The simple fact is, kneeling has been a gesture of respect, loyalty, even fealty, for centuries.  Many of us kneel when we pray, as a sign of respect.  And many players kept their hands over their hearts to reinforce that sign of respect.  This protest does not use kneeling as a sign of disrespect, but simply as a sign of protest--first, a protest against racialized police brutality, and second as a protest in favor of First Amendment rights.

Sixth:  Thus the real issues are (1) racialized police violence and (2) the right to protest itself--that is, free speech.

Once we accept the facts of the case, we can look at the underlying question of loyalty.

Loyalty here can mean many things.  It can mean loyalty to a flag, or to a song, or to a team, or to the Constitution, or even to a higher law.

Many Americans of course have strong emotional feelings about the flag, and we’re even in the habit of pledging our allegiance to it.  But while the actions that surround the flag often suggest that people regard it as something sacred, this cannot really be true. 

First, the U.S. Supreme Court has long determined that in the name of protest people may even burn the flag.  It also ruled that people have the right not to salute the flag. What this demonstrates, no matter how you feel about it, is that the right to protest is more important than this piece of cloth.  We cannot defend the flag by preventing protest.  Instead, we must protect protest even if it harms the flag.

Many Americans also have strong emotional attachment to the national anthem.  And the singing of the anthem at sports events became popular and routine during the 20^th century, and especially during and after World War II.  But most people only know the first verse, and except for the final line “The land of the free and the home of the brave,” the rest of the song is simply a celebration, not of American values or institutions, but of a battle victory over the British in 1812. 

The song has been linked to sports, but we do not sing it in a theater before a movie, or a play, or in church before each ceremony.  We are perfectly capable of being Americans and celebrating American values and institutions whether we sing this song or not.

These things symbolize our nation and our people, but they are only that: symbols. If we treat them as though we must love them to love the country, we make them fetishes, as if they are the whole of us. It’s like loving someone’s big toe, instead of the whole person. This is not patriotism, it’s pathology.

And worse, to turn this song or this flag into something sacred—something, for example, higher than protest itself--is to fail the loyalty test that Americans, and especially American Christians, should be passing.

For Americans, the values enshrined in our Constitution are the highest standards we possess as a people.  The right to protest is the First Right among these, and nothing else in our social life is higher or more important.  Any attempt to prevent rightful protest as “disrespectful” to the flag or the anthem--or even to the military--is actually an act of profound disrespect for the Constitution itself, the very foundation of our nation, which those other things represent..

And for Christians, the lesson should be even more obvious.  Treating any object--a song, a flag, even a veteran or soldier--as something sacred fails the test of loyalty to the First Commandment: “Thou shall not have false gods.” Christians believe that only God is sacred, and that God’s will creates a higher law than any other law.

That law includes, especially for Catholics, the idea that we are one human family, all children of God, all brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ, and that therefore any division among us is a scandal to our faith.

 The very notion that Blacks in our country have been mistreated for centuries must be a source of shame to all of us.  That shame reflects the fact that America has failed to do God’s will for centuries, that slavery really is our original sin, and that we have not finished our penance and amendment for that sin. Using the flag and the anthem as camouflage to hide that makes the sin worse. Using our soldiers as human shields to hide our sin is worst of all.

So while loyalty to team, to flag, to a song, to the military may all be good things, the real test of our loyalties this: is our first loyalty as Americans to the Constitution?  Is our first loyalty as people of faith to the will of God and God’s higher law?

Viewed this way, the controversy is hardly a “mere distraction.” As serious as the other problems facing us are, this challenge of loyalty to God and Constitution cannot be ignored, cannot be forgotten, cannot be avoided.  It is a test of loyalty that, sooner or later, this nation must pass—or the nation will fail.

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2017

#412: Pete Seeger: Forever Young

We have lost one of America’s great prophetic voices—a sort of secular saint.

When I was a kid my father belonged to the Colombian Record Club.  It had begun in the mid 1950s with the advent of LP vinyl records, and offered a new record each month.  If a member did not reject that offer, the record would arrive automatically two weeks later.  Sometimes, we just didn’t reply fast enough, or the offer got lost in the shuffle.  In such cases we would get a record we knew nothing about, or at least had no interest in.

In 1960, one of those records was “Children’s Concert at Town Hall,” featuring a banjo-playing singer named Pete Seeger.

   
 We had no idea who he was, and he played what I had always thought of as “hillbilly music.” At first, listening evoked images of the Appalachian back country.  But before long his clear voice, his compelling songs and even his plinking banjo had seduced me.  Little did I know that Pete Seeger had primed me for the folk revival about to explode upon me and most of America.

My first Pete Seeger concert was in 1962 at the old Boston Arts Festival, held outdoors in a makeshift fenced-in theater on Boston’s Public Garden.  The singer had just returned from a voyage in search of music in Africa, and shared many songs with us that today would qualify as “world music.” I remember being struck, at age 13, by several things: the immediacy of his stage presence, the rapt attention of his listeners, and his ability to engage us and the performance by getting us to sing along.

Over the next 50 years I would see Pete Seeger several more times: at Fenway Park in 1968, in the Victory Gardens on Boston’s Fenway in the 1970s, and a union-benefit concert in 1982 in Athol, Massachusetts.  By that time I would be grown, married, with two kids, and by that time Pete Seeger’s legacy would already be part of my life in more ways than one.

BOB DYLAN WITH PETE

The most obvious way was folk music itself.  My adolescence and early adulthood were profoundly enriched by the recordings and concert performances of Joan Baez, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, the Band, Jim Kweskin, Tom Rush, and Arlo Guthrie--all inspired by Pete Seeger’s work.

SPRINGSTEEN

CABREL

 Part of that enrichment, of course, included a socially significant subset of folk music: protest songs.   That tradition, linking music with social justice, extended to other prominent artists from the 1960s (Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs), and beyond that to the 21st century (Bruce Springsteen) and even abroad (France’s Francis Cabrel).

This link between music, art, and social awareness crystallized at the 1963 march on Washington, where folkies Peter, Paul, and Mary grafted urban folk onto the civil rights movement, and where Pete Seeger’s version of “We Shall Overcome” (which he first performed for Martin Luther King in 1957) became the movement’s national anthem.

And that song, more than any other, certifies Seeger’s status as the greatest song leader in American memory.  Pete was simultaneously so controlled and so charismatic that he could teach a song’s lyrics, leave the main tune to the crowd, and accompany them with two harmony lines--all it once, and with no accompaniment but his thundering 12 string guitar.  To hear Pete in action is to witness breathtaking genius paired with fervent conviction. I know no more powerful example of song leading than Pete Seeger's profoundly moving AND mobilizing, absolutely inimitable rendition of this song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2b24Ewk934g

Audiences were simultaneously galvanized and mesmerized. I recall the story from the Newport Folk Festival, back in the 1960s days when crowd control often broke down and rioting sometimes ensued. One night, in the middle of his concert, the lights went out in the stadium, but Pete kept them rapt and safe for more than 30 minutes in the dark.

And Pete Seeger’s skill as song leader did more than inspire audiences and social activists.  It also inspired an entire generation of sacred musicians, who launched the popular form we came to call “Folk Mass.” In parishes across America, song leaders playing guitars replaced choirs, or organ music, or no music at all.  Few of them possessed Seeger’s gifts, and many played faddish music that no one remembers, but it nonetheless marked a dramatic, even profound shift in Catholic worship.  In the best cases (of which they were thousands), it led to a substantial increase in participation in the Mass by Catholic congregations who were previously accustomed to mere passive observance.

My college years were deeply marked by this shift.  Each night at 11:00 PM, 100 or so students would gather for Mass in the campus chapel to sing along with Paul Quinlan, S.J. and his small ensemble.  Quinlan had set dozens of the Psalms to music in folk style, and the mimeographed lyrics served as our prime musical resource night after night.

 Less than five years after my first sight of Pete Seeger (which came just weeks before the opening of Vatican II in October 1962), Catholic liturgy was already transformed from a silence-bound, hidden, “sotto-voce” ceremony into a vibrant community celebration.  This was, of course, exactly what Pete hoped for his music in general, though he never had any direct involvement with church music:

At our college baccalaureate, Quinlan led the gathered graduates and families in singing “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”—Seeger’s poignant lament for war’s waste of life.  The selection was neither random nor political.  It was pastoral: we sang it in memory of the 17 alumni already killed in Vietnam as of 1970, with--we assumed rightly--more to follow.

Years later, as a parent, I was pleased to raise my kids in the “folk-mass” environment provided by Ken Meltz and Boston’s downtown Paulist Center.  For them, the first post-Vatican II generation, Mass was from the very start a communal exercise in active participation.

Seeger did not, of course, write much sacred music, yet ironically his two most famous works had sacred roots.  The Los Angeles rock group The Byrds scored a #1 hit by recording Pete’s “Turn, Turn, Turn,” which was based on the book of Ecclesiastes.  And Pete’s version of “We Shall Overcome” was adapted from a traditional gospel song, which itself was probably based on the old Latin (and Catholic) hymn “O Sanctissima.”

But as powerful as Seeger’s musical influence was, his cultural impact was far wider.  Whenever I struggled in my role as a father, I could hear Pete remind me that “parents have the most difficult and important job in the world.  But they also get the best pay: hugs and kisses.”

Beyond that, Pete taught me a number of valuable life-lessons. 

He taught me the value of participation--in public life, in liturgy, and in collaborative leadership.

He taught me the value of authenticity, displaying the same kind of natural humility that has made Pope Francis so instantly popular.

He taught me the value of healthy discontent--not as an ideological posture, but as an antidote to hide-bound conformity.  Here is how he introduces a final new verse of “We Shall Overcome”:

The best verse is the one they wrote down in Montgomery, Alabama: “We are not afraid.”And the young people taught everybody a lesson—all the older people that had learned how to compromise, learned how to take it easy, and be polite, and get along, and leave things as they were. The young people taught us all a lesson.

He taught me hope, if only because he chose a life of fearless struggle and was unrelenting well into his 90s.

He taught me the value of irreverence--how not to idolize authority.  In a real way, he was the wisdom figure behind the iconic 1960s bumper sticker “Question authority.” 

 Finally, Pete Seeger taught me the value of preserving one’s youth well into old age.  Against the old adage “youth is wasted on the young,” Pete refused to lament as he aged.  Instead, he recycled his own inner youth all through his life.  Even at 93, with his singing voice gone, his youth had not yet been wasted, as he proved in this “ageless” version of Bob Dylan’s “Forever Young”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ezyd40kJFq0

“You’re never too old to change the world”

  © Bernard  F. Swain PhD 2014