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I also found out that Obama and his family were celebrating MLK Day by participating in a community service project in Washington, DC. Now all of that sounds like a good thing for the ordinary person to do, but I have to say, it kinda irks me, especially after watching that MLK video.
MLK felt the 1954 Nobel Prize was "a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for the Brotherhood of Man." and it convinced him to be openly opposed to the War in Vietnam and all wars. What has Obama done for the brotherhood of man since he won his Nobel Prize? Has he opposed the War on Terror, or just made it bigger? Has his actions really helped the poor get out of poverty, or made more people poor by funneling their money to the rich? What's the point in remembering someone if you don't even care about the stuff they said and did that made them important enough to be remembered? MLK's gift to Obama was making it so he could still get elected, despite the color of his skin. What's he doing to repay that? His day of service sound like a great photo opportunity, but does it really make that big of a difference when he keeps these wars going that's destroying the lives of people on the other side of the world and here in America?
MLK said, "It is estimated that we spend $322,000 for each enemy we kill (in Vietnam), while we spend in the so-called war on poverty in America only about $53 for each person classified as 'poor'. And much of that $53 goes for salaries of people who are not poor. We have escalated the war in Vietnam and de-escalated the skirmish against poverty. It challenges the imagination to contemplate what lives we could transform if we were to cease killing." That was back then in the 1960's. How much do you think we're spending now to kill each terrorist (or person we assume to be a terrorist) when there are people in America without jobs, or kids that are going hungry? How much do you think we spend on destroying bridges, homes, power plants, and other infrastructure when our own nation is crumbling because we lack the funds to fix it? MLK and I would have seen eye to eye on fixing poverty in this country being a top priority, but we probably wouldn't agree on how to do it. Still, we both had the same end goal. However, you can't see eye to eye on opposing war when you actually want to escalate it!
We currently look at the shooting in Arizona and ask, why did it happen. Why did Jared Loughner shoot Gabrielle Giffords and all those other people? Why do any of these mass shootings in the past few decades happen? People want to blame easy access to guns, or violent movies, music, drugs, bad parents, Sarah Palin's cross-hair map, and a million other things. Some of that might be partly to blame. However, I think MLK hit the nail on the head when he talked in this speech about trying to convince violent revolutionaries to use peace and "They ask if our nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems to bring about the changes it wanted." They were justifying what they were doing by looking at what our government was doing. It's hard to convince someone who is mentally unstable that killing and other crimes are wrong when your own government you voted for are killing thousands of innocent people, locking peaceful people up for drugs, forcefully taking their money in the form of taxes, and doing all of this stuff on such a massive scale that you not only fail to complain about, you actually support. Nobody can learn from a hypocrite. Hypocrites don't lay out the right answer and the wrong answer. They just say the same answer is right and wrong. Some people might choose the right answer and some will choose the wrong one. Is violence the answer to problems? Most people will say no, but our actions will say yes and usually actions speak louder than words. What do you think would have sparked this guy more to violence, a map with cross-hairs, or the fact that Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, and others politicians recently said that Julian Assange should be executed for what he did and that they support these war? It makes it even clearer for this unstable guy to come to the conclusion that violence is the answer to his problems. When we as a nation accept that some people can be killed for reasons other than the rare cases of self defense, we should not act surprised when people kill for reasons other than self defense. MLK went on in that speech to repeat the old phrase "You shall reap what you sow." Well, it doesn't take a gardener to realize that for every seed of violence America plants, we will be reaping the many fruits of violence in the days to come.
