WHAT IS NOT JUST

OK. So it's MLK Day and I'm on a roll. I love Thomas Merton. He spoke out for peace and against nuclear weapons when almost no one else was.  He mentored individuals like the Berrigan brothers. His order tried to silence him telling him writing about war and peace was not a job for an enclosed religious. And he started his speaking out at a time when King was leading marches and concentrating on civil rights.

But Martin Luther King faced some of the same arguments. What does a preacher know about war? What does a civil rights leader know about war? Stick to what is safe. Stick to the person we believe we know.

But as the backlashes in the north increased and the guns took money from the poverty programs King pushed back against the critics and spoke out. You can't have peace without justice. You can't solve the problems without justice. And most importantly you can't solve the problems of minority injustice and poverty unless you solve it for everyone. And you can't solve the problems of poverty and injustice in one country without addressing poverty and injustice in all countries.

Hoover called King the most dangerous man in the country. To be honest the Kings and the Mertons were and are the most dangerous individuals in the world.They reach a place where they recognize the dangers and decided to push ahead anyway.

"A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily upon the glaring contest between poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America only to take the profits out with no concern for the countries and say "this is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say "this is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from  them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "this business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and law. A nation that continues to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom." .

From MLK's speech Conscience and the Viet Nam War

Martin died from a bullet on the balcony of a Memphis hotel. Merton received permission to attend an ecumenical gathering in Thailand and died accidentally in his room after his speech. One man was carried to his grave in a farm wagon drawn by a couple of mules. The other came home in a military transport filled with the bodies of service men killed in action in a war we never won and still haunts us.

And as usual I started out to write one thing and ended up somewhere else.