Dr. King. A Tom Degan rant.

"It's ironic that the forty-second anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King should fall on Easter Sunday." Degan notes that early in his post. I give only an excerpt, from here, where I urge every reader to go to the item itself for a full read.

One year before his death - forty-three years ago today - he gave a sermon at the Riverside Church in New York City:

"A nation that continues, year after year, to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

Well, what the hey! It appears to me that the good doctor was onto something there! In fact, we're way beyond "approaching spiritual doom", we're there, baby! Take a good look around you. This ain't your father's America. It's not even close. Paging Dr. King indeed.

Here's an even bigger irony: His assassin might have saved himself the inconvenience of a long prison sentence had he just waited a few short years. The sad fact of the matter is that by the spring of 1968, Dr. King was not long for this world. His autopsy revealed heart disease so advanced, it is doubtful he would have lived to see his mid-forties. His lifelong fondness for deep-fried southern cooking notwithstanding, the very fact of just being Martin Luther King must have been a burden that would have killed men a lot younger than he. Perhaps we should consider ourselves fortunate that he walked in our midst for as long as he did.

"If we assume that mankind has the right to exist, then we must find an alternative to war and destruction. In our day of space vehicles and guided ballistic missiles, the choice is either nonviolence or nonexistence."

That's what I love about this guy! American history is littered with "Christian" religious leaders. Try as you might, you can't escape them. The thing that sets the right, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. apart from most of these guys is the fact that he wasn't a hypocrite.