For some time now I have expressed my concern that the real obstacles to peacemaking are not the “Tea Party” or the military. I regrettably believe it is the ‘white liberal’, those who talk peace and justice but fail to act. It is hard for me to say since many of them I call friends. Nearly 2000 of them came out to protest a small hate rally of about 20 Nazi’s a few weeks ago. However, when thousands came out to honor the new president of Marquette University there were just about 10 of us present outside the building to plea that the new president and Marquette University [[ TeachWarNoMore/MUPeace |Be Faithful to the Gospel and stop teaching war and violence on campus, training you men and women to “kill or be killed”.
On September 24, 1968 when 14 of us, who came to be known as the Milwaukee 14, burned draft records of young men who were 1A and about to be drafted into a war to “kill or be killed” thousands stood with us. Where have all those people of the 60’s gone….to be peace liberals?
I remember the quote from Martin Luther King Jr. I put on the Breaking the Silence Quote web page when he reaches the conclusion that the great stumbling block to the civil rights movement was not the “White Citizens’ Council or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action” (Full quote is below)
But to be truly nonviolent one must love friends as well as enemies. I have no problem with ‘white liberals’ not remembering that September 24th was the anniversary of the Milwaukee 14 but it does bother me that the message, the wiliness to sacrifice than see young adults be trained to “kill or be killed” in unjust and immoral wars, is lost.
With a president in the White House controlling a growing use of “Killer Drones”, with more and more people suffering poverty and hunger each day or unable to get medical care, while the very few become filthy rich, with the marginalization of more people especially the sick and poor, with discrimination running rampant and with the Church looking the other way where have all the white liberals gone?
Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” January 19, 2008
“I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season’. Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.” —
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