Introducing The Real Dr. King

To: licia.corbella@calgarysun.com
Re: “Jack’s iPocrisy”

Dear Ms. Corbella,

Your article published in Wednesday’s Calgary Sun entitled “Jack’s iPocrisy” makes remarkable claims about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and what he stood for. Fortunately, the public doesn’t have to rely on columnists to learn what King really believed. We have his words to go by.

On April 4, 1964, one year to the day before his murder, King gave a speech entitled “Beyond Vietnam”. In New York’s Riverside Church, King – a revolutionary leader if there ever was one – called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” and decried the war as an “enemy of the poor” because it drained their social programs at home while killing them overseas.

In marked contrast to your contempt for social programs and “welfare recipients” who receive assistance “because they’d rather not work”, in his speech King warns that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death” and criticizes America for being “on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create hell for the poor”.

Each year on Martin Luther King Day, which was just this past Monday, we are treated to the appalling spectacle of people honoring King while betraying what he believed in. In death, King has become a safe touchstone for feel-good complacency. In life, he was a fiery challenger of the policies of the American government, a vigorous voice of the poor, and a staunch defender of the type of social programs Layton advocates that you have so little regard for.

You also claim that if a Canadian politician were to echo Kennedy’s famous “ask not what your country can do for you” phrase, they would be committing “political suicide”, earn “national pariah” status and cause a nationwide wave of “hysteria and fear mongering”.

This is silliness, on par with Bill O’Reilly’s “you can’t say Merry Christmas any more”. But how much more consternation would result, especially among conservatives, if a politician were to stand up and say that America is “on the wrong side of a world revolution” or that “war is not the answer”, as King does in this speech?

In the same paragraph in which you say that King would disqualify Svend Robinson from running from re-election – a remarkable assumption to make about a man of whom you appear to be in substantial ignorance – you say that King’s “main message was love”. Love appears in this speech too:

“This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men.”

King goes on to say this is an “oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept”.

How true.

Sincerely,

Adrian Duyzer