“Hands Up, Don’t Shoot!”

Racism is to Militarism as gasoline is to fire. A culture that thinks it is superior can justify killing others. Martin Luther King Jr., a year before he was assassinated, in his famous speech “Beyond Vietnam — A Time to Break Silence” said “When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

The equality of all human beings, young, old, black, white, men, women, poor, rich is given nominally recognition by most Americans but is not normally practiced. I heard today about a white woman with a weapon that was a threat to police. However, the police were able to disarm her without killing her. If Dontre Hamilton was an unarmed white man sleeping on a county park bench and approached by an African American police officer, who wakes him, pats him down, struggles with him, beats him and then shoots the white man 14 times, would the black police officer be held accountable? People can say “Black Lives Matter” but then justify violence against blacks on the basis that most black violence is on black persons. Our police chief, mayor, sheriff and call those who protest for justice for Dontre ‘thugs’, ‘anarchist’, ‘radicals’, ‘outside agents’ and ‘disappointments’, but name calling is just an excuse for not hearing the message: “Black Lives Matter.”

How can our country that has the largest military force in the world, more than the next nine militaries combined, call for citizens to not use violence on each other and then go and send a “killer drone” to a village in Yemen to kill a suspected terrorist and whoever gets in the way.

Militarism and Racism are linked by violence. The bigger, more powerful force, be a man in an abusive relationship or a country in conflict with another, is expected to be the one who, with a bigger weapon defeats the other.

Martin Luther King Jr. called for a revolution of values that he believed was necessary for change: He calls on us to see the evil of militarism and racism for what they are, evils, and to take direct nonviolent action against them.

In the same speech, “Beyond Vietnam” King says near the conclusion “Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism.”

Martin Luther King Jr. as many blacks, who have suffered and been suppressed was not talking ‘pie in the sky.’ He was talking specifically, like the struggle of the sanitation workers in Memphis to get decent treatment and decent wage. He was talking about blacks in North Central Milwaukee, Milwaukee’s most racially segregated and poorest neighborhood who must choose between the crumbs’ of white society and organizations or stand up for themselves. Racism and militarism are two sides of the same coin. You cannot maintain racism without violence and militarism and you cannot support militarism with respecting the rights of all, despite race.

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