On civil disobedience

Martin Luther King Jr. was one traumatic experience for me in Dallas, Texas, in ’68 since I was in a car accident the evening he was assassinated. He was shot a second time when I woke up at my university hospital and the nurse exclaimed, “Thank God, they finally got the nigger!” after the TV anchor made the announcement. Only a month before, I joined an ecumenical group of priests, pastors, and rabbis in a march (the Baptist preacher, Abraham Herschel, and others in locked arms in the lead) in Washington, D.C., to egg forward the war against poverty and to protest the badly conceived war in Vietnam.

I was young and would have been prone to mischief in the parliament of the street but MLK Jr.’s whole example pointed to Mahatma Gandhi’s tactics and strategies of civil disobedience and non-violent protest used in South Africa and India, so I had to stymie the youthful urge for volatile action and allow the intensity of my passion to rage on the mending of my body and soul should I ever be exposed to lasting scars from the violence of others. 

Mandela would just have been into his fifth year in jail into what proved to be a 27-year sojourn behind South Africa’s iron bars, but already he was showing signs that his efforts was going to be a turn away from violent means to exact revenge against forces that kept his country in apartheid and him in confinement to aiming the assistance of his country to answer how the future generation was going to live. 

MLK Jr. would have been 85 years old today; he was barely 39 years old when I cast my being into his shadows. Of course, I was only 23 years young then, too. Ah, so long ago and what a springtime it was. But the issues he died for and we lived with are not gone.

Even today in the Northern Marianas, those of indigenous descent (however that is defined) are claiming rights and privileges reminiscent of times when some folks thought themselves to be more equal than others. You’d think we’ve learned our lessons. Nyet! Bu! When economic competition blows its horn at the investment line, in both times of scarcity and plenty, the claim for special rights and privileges of a few have a tendency to rear its ugly head.

This article not focused on the personhood of MLK no more than focusing on Abraham Lincoln just because I want to delve into the emancipation of slaves. Speaking of slaves, the Golden Globes awards (from members of Hollywood’s foreign journalists) just gave the movie 12 Years a Slave, a historical drama of a free New Yorker kidnapped and sold to slavery in Louisiana, the Movie-of-the-Year recognition. The nation’s sensitivity to our historic shift from an all-white male image of leadership to having a Barack Obama in the White House may finally be making some headway.

But not too quick. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, hiring a discontinued GOP researcher as head of his staff, vows to get his constituents’ “voices heard in Washington and to promote a positive policy agenda that will restore economic growth, rein in government overreach, and protect Americans’ personal liberties.” Add “equitable” to economic growth, and Cruz sounds MLK-ish!

Our concern for the moment is the tactic of civil disobedience in pursuit of civil rights. The U.S. Bill of Rights protects individual’s freedom from infringement by public officials and private organizations, ensuring one’s right to participate in civil and political life without repression nor discrimination. Protection of these rights includes equality in the diversity of race, gender, national origin, sexual orientation, ethnicity and color, religion, and disability; it protects individual rights to privacy, freedoms of conscience and thought, speech and expression, religion, the press, assembly, and movement.

But the tactic of civil disobedience is not a walk in the park. It may redound to mere battles of images but when applied, the blunt of the bludgeon and the trash of the truncheon do not sit easy on the cranium. Whether it is old folks lining up to protest the construction of Keystone pipelines from the tar sands of Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico, to kelp divers in Jeju Do watching their livelihoods upended by towering cranes building a U.S. naval station to watch over non-Chinese oil claims (through SoKor and Nippon) in the China Sea, or the silent sufferings of various refugee camps of displaced people caught in the competing natural resource cartels in Nigeria, Libya, Sudan, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, the bold stance of “NO” and the assertive declarations of “YES” from local democratic impulses are running up against the vested interests of monarchs and centralized powers across the planet. 

Ironically, in the United States, the actuations of the tea party of late, and the fast of the young man in Utah protesting the legalization of same-sex marriages, are recipes straight out of the Gandhi-MLK-Mandela cookbooks on civil disobedience.

So Martin (I am much older now than when we met), I glance at your legacy again today, knowing that the struggle you had is not real until I see its likeness in my very own.