It is hard to imagine a more wrong-headed analysis of Rev. King’s philosophy of non-violence. After correctly noting King’s unwavering stand against the Vietnam War, Johnson loses his way. Quoting from the “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech given the day before King was assassinated, Johnson mistakenly likens King’s reference to the  compassionate aid of the Good Samaritan to the Shock and Awe of a mighty armed force. He equates giving aid to waging war.

It would be charitable to assume Johnson was being sensitive to his military audience and ignorant of history. More likely he was willfully changing the past to justify the present.

Whatever your opinion of America’s War on Terror, our military deserves better. Shame on Mr. Johnson.

*     *     *     *     *

I include the relevant portions of Johnson’s talk below, but first, an impassioned take on this issue.

*     *     *     *     *

Excerpts:

[T]he most controversial and difficult stand Dr. King took the final year of his life was against the war in Vietnam. Other civil rights leaders urged him to remain silent on the issue, not to alienate President Lyndon Johnson, who had been their best friend on civil rights. Martin Luther King hated violence. He believed that violence “is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy,” and that “returning violence for violence multiples violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars . . . He also believed “an eye for eye leaves everybody blind.” So, beginning in April 1967, one year before he died, Dr. King, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, turned this message into an impassioned plea against the war in Vietnam. Indeed, from that point on he questioned the whole rationale for war in general.  From the gospel song “Down by the Riverside,” Dr. King repeated the line: “I Ain’t Gonna Study War No More.”

I believe that if Dr. King were alive today, he would recognize that we live in a complicated world, and that our Nation’s military should not and cannot lay down its arms and leave the American people vulnerable to terrorist attack.

To our individual servicemen and women who wonder whether their mission is consistent with Martin Luther King’s own message and beliefs, I refer you again to his very last speech in Memphis, the night before he died. In it Dr. King talked about Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan on the dangerous road to Jericho. With great effect Dr. King drew a parallel between the priest and the Levite who passed by the man on the road to Jericho, beaten and robbed and in need of aid, and failed to help him, and those in Memphis in April 1968 who hesitated to help the striking sanitation workers because they feared for their own jobs, for their own comfortable positions in the Memphis community. He criticized those who are “compassionate by proxy,” and said to those in the audience in Memphis that night, “The question is not, if I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?  The question is, if I do not stop the sanitation workers, what will happen to them.”

In 2011, I draw the parallel to our own servicemen and women, deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere, away from the comfort of conventional jobs, their families and their homes.  Those in today’s volunteer Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps have made the conscious decision to travel a dangerous road, and personally stop and administer aid to those who want peace, freedom and a better place in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and in defense of the American people.  Every day our servicemen and women practice that “dangerous unselfishness”

*     *     *     *     *

Rev. King’s actual words were: The question is not, “If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?” “If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?” That’s the question.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

As a result of advances in computer technology, these eternal questions will soon (long before this century is over, IMO) be explored in ways that go further and deeper than religion, philosophy, and literature have done before.

I am reading Hans Moravec‘s 1999 book, Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind. In a field like computer science, where an 11-year-old book should be completely irrelevant, Moravec’s prescience and predictions are still remarkable. I was struck by two paragraphs that sum up my views on artificial intelligence. Moravec, an adjunct faculty member at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, asks whether a robot driven by what he refers to as “fourth-generation” technology (think very powerful super-computers and highly advanced software) could have “an internal mental life anything like ours. Is it conscious of its existence? Does it have emotions?”

Moravec writes (p. 111):

The key insight is that the “animating principle is not a substance” or a spirit…or a soul. It is “a very particular, very complex organization.”

There should be no despair in this insight. To be animated by complex organization is no less miraculous.

Rejoice in that miracle…and watch for the next one.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

I am next to Miss Jones

It was 1953. I was eight. I had known California for over five years and knew bits of New York and Pennsylvania through my parents’ stories.

Miss Jones was from someplace between the coasts. I’ve forgotten her first name, and I’ve forgotten the state. Iowa, maybe Nebraska. She was my fourth grade teacher, and as I recreate her image, she was light-haired, pale-skinned, bird-like, under 25, and orderly. She did not laugh aloud. She was a first-year teacher. She was a Christian.

We studied California history in fourth grade. I remember the map on the bulletin board that charted Junipero Serra‘s missions, each so logically a day’s ride from the next on El Camino Real.

I remember the unfolding excitement of the Gold Rush. I remember being very alive. But unlike all my other elementary school teachers, K-6, I have only one narrative memory of Miss Jones.

Winter was a just week away, but Oxnard weather was always mild, making snowy Christmas decorations oddly inappropriate in our schools and streets. That day it rained, and the inclement weather limited our recess, so we were treated to some extra art time.

“Draw your favorite Christmas character,” Miss Jones urged. Pupils took out materials and began. I didn’t. I took out a Hardy Boys book. For a while, Miss Jones sat at her desk, grading or reviewing papers. After a few minutes the first quiet of coloring had passed into chatter and comment, so she stood and went desk-to-desk to tamp the noise and gauge artistic progress. When she came to my desk, she stopped.

“Stevie, where is your drawing of your favorite Christmas character?”

“I didn’t do one.”

“Why not?

“I don’t celebrate Christmas.”

She was wordless for a moment, then, “Everybody celebrates Christmas.”

“I don’t. I’m Jewish.”

I didn’t understand her long pause. I thought she might be mad at me for disobeying her instructions. But she was actually incredulous. She had, I later realized, never met a Jew before.

“What difference does that make?” She asked.

I gave an eight-year-old’s explanation, so the rest of the conversation was repeats, in various rewordings, of the above exchange, finally ending with Miss Jones shaking her head and continuing with her lesson plan.

Three days later, with Christmas vacation a nearby reality, some of us in the classroom were in a manic state. One of my mates said something exciting, and I reacted, “Gee whiz!”

Miss Jones, several desks away, attending to a student’s needs, spun around, strode over, and escorted me quickly out of the room and into the corridor. I had no idea why. “What did you say?” Her voice was shaky, but not loud.

“Huh?”

“Did you say,” she paused…then lowered her voice, “Gee whiz?”

I wasn’t exactly sure what I had said…but I maybe I did, so I nodded. She leaned a bit lower, and with a stern, yet pitying tone, told me, “Christmas is a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ. Since you do not participate in that holiday, you, more than anyone else, must not take the Lord’s name in vain.”

“I didn’t.” My plaintive defense was based on confusion and inexperience. My family belonged to the one small temple in Ventura County. But in school I had never given being Jewish much thought. I had been, and would be throughout elementary school, the one Jew in any class I was ever in. My uniqueness in this little farming town—a community, I supposed, like Miss Jones’ in Iowa—had been completely unremarkable until then.

I then got a lesson in Christianity and euphemism. Gosh darn it! Golly! Gee willickers!

I was fascinated. I loved words. I asked for more examples. She began, “Cheese and crackers!”…then realizing that the lesson was being lost on me, returned us to the room.

I had been one of her favorites until then. No longer. I was treated politely, but thinly, for the rest of the school year.

My fifth grade teacher was also a first-year teacher. She was dark-haired, olive-skinned, curvy, and vivacious. She was from New York. Her name was Doris Diamond. She was Jewish.

Gee whiz! I loved her.

(She hated Oxnard and left the next year.)

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.