Martin Luther King and the Silent Betrayal of our Veterans

*Originally published by Sojourners on April 4, 2011. It has since been removed.

Forty three years ago today, Martin Luther King was shot and killed in Memphis Tennessee. Forty four years ago today, he gave a speech in New York City that marked his decisive turn toward decrying militarism, which he named one of the three "isms" of evil, alongside racism and materialism. In the speech, he said that "a true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war… This way of settling differences is not just… of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love."

Martin's namesake, Martin Luther, was named after Martin of Tours, the patron saint of soldiers and chaplains. It should not surprise us that the great American prophet shares a spiritual genealogy with the soldier that told the most powerful man in the known world that, as a soldier of Christ, he could not be a part of the empire's bloodshed.

Today soldiers are bringing home the wounds of war in massive numbers. In hours, they go from a world where the violence is external and obvious, to a totally different world, where the war is waged internally. The spiritual stowaways of the Enemy have a way of wreaking havoc and hell in ways against which their family, their school, and the church have no weapons. Because we here at "home" are not equipped to fight for those who have fought for us, we find very good reasons to do nothing. Dr. King, in his speech in New York, made the case that "silence is betrayal," that inactivity cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love.

Jesus told Peter that "those who live by the sword die by the sword." What he didn't explain is that he didn't only mean that violent people could expect to die by the violent means of others. Jesus also surely knew that to die by the sword would even include falling on one's own. As a friend has written before, "violence is suicidal"; agents of violence often become the victim of moral ambiguity, self-condemnation, and, worst of all, societal apathy. Veterans and soldiers have the highest suicide rate of any recorded demographic in our nation's entire recorded history. I wonder if the prophet was being optimistic, if in fact silence is not merely betrayal, but fratricide.

Originally published in Sojourners. Archived at https://civilianally.com/vita/20110404-sojo