Headlines: 44 years ago and today

Alright, this is probably a bit political for this particular blogspot, but these things are supposed to be a little cathartic, right, and I’m a little bugged. In the building that I currently work in, the only palatable radio station that I receive on my Jensen tape player walkman is Minnesota Public Radio. More often than not, this station will bore me to tears, but better that than the alternative right-wing talk station or the crummy popular music stations. Unfortunately my beloved KFAN’s FM signal does not quite have the juice to make it to my workstation, but so it goes. Today, at least the majority of the day, was thought provoking on MPR. The content was interesting, but the context in which the content was presented was what really struck me and has gotten my hackles up.

Forty-four years ago today, on April 4, 1968, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. To honor the man, the Midday program, played a really well done one-hour American RadioWorks documentary titled “Martin Luther King’s last march”. If anyone gets an hour to listen to the program, I highly recommend it. I am by no means an historian on Dr. King, but I will try to sum up the gist of the documentary as I understood it. The program was focused on the last year of Dr. King’s life, and how his ministry’s message had begun to change from strictly advocating for equal political rights for African Americans to becoming more global in scope. Dr. King began speaking out against the Vietnam War. He began emphasizing economic justice and a redistribution of wealth as the means to ultimately address the plight of African Americans at the time. The shift in his ministry to preach about social justice issues led him to go to Memphis to support the city’s striking garbage workers. Dr. King’s initial attempt to organize a general strike of Memphis’s African American workers turned violent, in contravention of his tactic of non-violence. The failure of the initial march led Dr. King to return six days later to Memphis where he was ultimately slain on April 4, forty-four years ago. The radio program played highlights of the sermons that Dr. King delivered during this time, and the power and timelessness of his message still resonates. Had Dr. King only been able to continue his mission of seeking social justice, one wonders how different this country might be today.

One thing about Minnesota Public Radio, they will play remarkable, thought-provoking documentaries, and, if you listen long enough, you’ll also get inundated with the news of the day. Today’s headlines is the prism in which I heard and digested the King documentary. The contrast between the vision and aims of Dr. King and the headlines of today could not be starker. How little has changed! Dr. King spoke about how giving African Americans equal political rights was easy for the government, because it didn’t cost anything. In his mind, to really address the societal ills caused by economic inequality would be hard; it would cost billions of dollars. It has proven difficult. Speaking at Ebenezer Baptist Church on April 30, 1967, Dr. King stated:

And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money, like some demonic, destructive suction tube. And you may not know it, my friends, but it is estimated that we spend $500,000 to kill each enemy soldier, while we spend only fifty-three dollars for each person classified as poor, and much of that fifty-three dollars goes for salaries to people that are not poor.

Forty-four years later, the U.S. is involved in 3 wars. The latest “kinetic military action” in Libya is against a state that offers no threat to the United States, and is going forward despite no attempt to gain any sort of congressional approval. Spending on these wars since 2001 is over $1,175,000,000,000. The conservative Cato Institute cites federal spending on Health and Human Services programs to be $869 billion in the 2010 budget. No doubt, spending on poverty programs has grown since Dr. King’s day, and the quality of that spending versus simply an increase in the costs of services should be addressed by others far more capable than myself, to me, however, it is simply striking that in forty-four years military adventures and Asia and Africa continue to take primary budgetary importance over services designed to care for Americans who are in the most need.

Budget issues grip federal, state and local governments these days, and they are all over the headlines. There simply is not enough revenue to cover the services that people are used to receiving from their government. The Republican controlled House of Representatives is about to propose $4 trillion dollars in budget cuts over the next ten years. According to the Wall Street Journal “The plan would essentially end Medicare, which now pays most of the health-care bills for 48 million elderly and disabled Americans, as a program that directly pays those bills.” In Minnesota the budget proposed by the legislature “features a plan that forces more than 100,000 people at or near the poverty line from state-funded health insurance and instead provides a voucher to find insurance on the private market.” Transportation funding also threatens to get cut, to such an extent that a bus ticket in Minneapolis could cost $4 more per fare. Oh, and Minnesota’s budget also calls for a tax cut for businesses and individuals. Minnesota is not alone, of course. Residents of nearly every state could point to proposed budget provisions that seek to address deficits by cutting spending on those who rarely contribute to reelection funds.

The final bit of news that struck me today was a story about the institution of the President’s reelection bid.
According to the NPR story that I heard, the President is expected to raise a campaign budget of nearly $1 billion for the 2012 election. I am naïve and I am a projector. When I heard the words of Dr. King today, rightly, wrongly, simplistically or worse, racially, I thought about the President’s first run for office. I am sure that he never claimed to share anything with Dr. King. He did run a “Hope” and “Change” campaign, however. On Election Night, President-elect Obama stated:

This is our moment. This is our time – to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American Dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth – that out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope, and where we are met with cynicism, and doubt, and those who tell us that we can’t, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people . . . .

To be fair, I love what has been done regarding nuclear arms control. I love the steps being taken to provide universal health care. I hope it survives the next budget. In many ways, however, things seem so much the status quo. What is to be expected, though, we’re still faced with issues relating to equality and social justice that were there forty-four years ago.