MARTIN LUTHER KING'S MESSAGE FOR OUR TIME

An Address at Mo'oheau Bandstand, Hilo, Hawai'i

January 19, 2004

© Robert Aitken 2004

Today is a State holiday, memorializing Martin Luther King, the master teacher of our generation, who was assassinated in 1968 at the age of 39. If he were alive today, he would be 75 years old, eleven years my junior. For our generation, he is among the great political geniuses of the Western hemisphere. To sense his creative power of moral persuasion, you need only read his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," his oration "I Have a Dream," or his address to the Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam at the Riverside Church in New York. It is that latter address, delivered on April 4, 1967, just one year to the day before he was killed, that inspires my words to you this morning,

Dr. King opened his address by expressing his accord with the first lines of a statement by the executive committee of the Clergy and Laymen, "A time comes when silence is betrayal," saying, "The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, [citizens] do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war."

Remember that this was the leader of leaders in the mighty civil rights movement that sought justice for African Americans during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Looking back on the gains won by his people earlier in the decade, Dr. King said sadly, "A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poorÑboth black and whiteÑthrough the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war. 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 destruction suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such."

Let me as a lifetime resident of these Islands explore with you the analogy of Martin Luther King's position on the American continent back then 36 years ago with our present situation in Hawai'i. If the war in Vietnam broke and eviscerated the War on Poverty, today the economic interest of the wealthy few has served to justify the dismantling of environmental protection set in place by the Theodore Roosevelt administration a hundred years ago. War and Homeland Security go hand in hand with the dismantling of social, educational and economic programs set up in the Franklin Roosevelt administration sixty-five years ago, and threaten political protections established in our Constitution more than two hundred years ago.

It was clear to Dr. King that peace and social justice was a worldview, and that without decency in Vietnam there could be no decency in South Central Los Angeles. That is, without a radical shift from imperialism to one-world solidarity, without a shift from utter cruelty to human decency, there could be no shift to address the exploitation of Negroes, or, as we would say today, African Americans. And if he were standing on this podium today, he would say for sure that without decency in the Middle East, there can be no decency in Papa'i or Makua. Unless there is a radical shift in public policy toward Iraq, there can be no radical shift at Pohakuloa. If there is no shift from cruelty to decency to all humanity and all species, there can be no shift to address the exploitation and neglect of the Kanaka Maoli and many of the rest of us.

We are all Americans, whether we like it or not. At this moment, I don't like it very much. But I am an American citizen and am subject to American law, and if I deny that fact and all its ramifications, then big guys with short haircuts and neatly pressed aloha shirts would soon disabuse me of my delusions. African Americans were treated as citizens by the United States when it was convenient, and Dr. King deplored "taking young black men who had been crippled by society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Georgia and East Harlem."

I deplore with you the way young people of our Islands who joined the Reserves or the National Guard to supplement their poverty wages and to enhance their dim prospects for career and education are being sent far away to Iraq to guarantee the justice that they don't have in Papakolea or on Molokai.

It is the same national self-interest that led to the annexation of the nation of Hawai'i for the sake of Pearl Harbor that has led to the overthrow of Iraq for the sake of its oil. Saddam Hussein was and is an evil man, but the world is full of evil dictators. We aren't at war with Indonesia, because successions of monstrously murderous dictators there have cooperated with American imperialist aims. Let's see the world as it is, and if you're like me, you'll come down on the side of humanity. "Humanity" is global word for "human," a word that was pronounced and meant "humane" until a few centuries ago. To be human is to be humane, our ancestors knew, so let's be true to their wisdom and take the high road on our own. Sovereignty is not something we'll get from the likes of Inouye or Akaka or Abercrombie or Case or Lingle. I personally give up on those guys already. I am here at this rally to express my resistance to the acquisitive system that is ruining everything, and I sense you are here for that reason too. We all want sovereignty, all of us, Kanaka Maoli and the rest of us too. The system is taking us all down, and we're doomed together unless we stick together, like bread and jelly. We've got the foundation of true sovereignty in place, and together we can use the system and not be used by it. We can change things from the inside.

Our situation in Hawai'i differs in several ways from that of United States in the 1960s. I think Martin Luther King would be sensitive to that difference, and might cite Mahatma Gandhi's teaching to us, for Gandhi was one of Dr. King's inspirations. In 1910 Gandhi wrote hoping that it might inspire the way of independence for his compatriots. And indeed it became a handbook for the movement. The key word is "swaraj," independence, by which Gandhi meant economic and spiritual independence, as well as political separation from England.

As a boy I saw a newsreel of Gandhi at a public meeting with British government ministers. They wore top hats and morning coats, a form of dress a notch above tuxedos, and were seated in chairs on a platform looking very solemn. Gandhi was seated at their feet on the floor of the platform, dressed in a dhoti, the Indian equivalent of a malo, and he was twirling a small spinning wheel, making thread from cotton. The dignitaries were obviously baffled.

From this remove we can tell them what Gandhi was doing. He was demonstrating swaraj, he was showing them independence; he was showing them sovereignty. The English were manufacturing cloth and selling it to the people of India. That put the people of India on a cash economy, replacing the barter economy that kept them independent. "So we grow our own cotton, spin our own thread, and make our own clothes," Gandhi was saying.

Hawai'i has the same history. Corned beef supplanted kalua pig; canned sardines replaced ama ama, canned vegetables replaced luau, chemicals replaced healing herbs, and Mother Hubbards replaced the lole. When Queen Ka'ahumanu greeted the missionaries in 1820, she was wearing a perfectly respectable and modest dress. Her shoulders were exposed, as paintings of her at the time reveal, but that was, and continues to be appropriate to our climate. I am sure that the missionaries honestly felt that exposing the shoulders was immodest, but this conviction was convenient to the project of putting the Kanaka Maoli on a cash economy by promoting foreign cloth. Thus developed the holoku and the mu'umu'u. This shirt that I wear is a reminder of that kind of economic imperialism. Its very name is a reminder, for "palaka" is not a Hawaiian word. It is probably the English word "block," for "block print." The cloth was manufactured in New England, as it always has been, beginning more than a hundred years ago. Plantation workers who labored in fields that were originally forest wore these the shirts. Thus the circulation of the gift that marked the economy of the ahupua_a was replaced by the an economy that produced income for people in San Francisco and Boston, and local folks were obliged to work for their oppressors long before annexation, not just in plantations, but in even more degrading jobs.

Let's take a leaf from Gandhi. Make no mistake, he wanted political independence, and that's why he was there meeting with British government ministers. But he wanted true independence, economic, spiritual, social, personal independence, as well as political. I think both he and Dr. King would advise us to bang on our pots for political sovereignty, and also to find ways to create the sovereignty that begins at home.

This is not the sovereignty of "me me me." It's the sovereignty of the 'ohana, the inclusive "we." And we don't have to look far for instructive examples. The spirit of 'ohana is alive and well across our Islands. I remember the story my father told of one of his co-workers in their construction company during the Great Depression in Honolulu. The man said to him, "You have two sons, and I have none, because my wife can't have children. Why don't you give one of them to us?"

My dad knew about the traditional custom of adoption, "hanai," but I didn't and I was alarmed until he explained, and assured me that it wasn't going to happen. But to this day, as in the misty past of earliest times, society has been kept in balance in these Islands by the custom of hanai. When the traditional guidelines are followed, children get chances they would not otherwise have, and they enrich their new families. Queen Lili_uokalani was a hanai child, who had a hanai daughter. Aunty Mary Kawena Pukui, our national treasure of traditional wisdom, was a hanai child who also had one of her own.

The hanai tradition is an essential element and indeed it is a proof of the larger 'ohana spirit that extends beyond the immediate family to the community, and often further. All over these Islands you will find pockets of co-housing with cooperative childcare, elder care, car and home repair, and carpooling. You'll find that same kind of enterprise off the grid in the medial-strip fish market of South Hilo. The brothers you see there, often with their boats still hitched to their pickups, are bringing fish directly from the sea to you, and they are showing the sovereignty banner. "So much for the system!" they are saying, and the folks at their stalls in farmers markets in almost every community on this Island are saying the same thing. "We are the sovereigns!"

We can build on this foundation. The Waianae Coast Development Corporation and other programs along the Waianae coast of O'ahu are shining examples of the way. Backyard gardens, backyard fishponds, hands on, and muddy feet training in pulling kalo; the folks over there are on the track of sovereignty that can ultimately bring down the power of greed and oppression.

The Industrial Workers of the World had the slogan: "Build the new within the shell of the old." Our slogan can be, "Rebuild the traditional within the shell of corruption." This is a path that takes discipline. For one thing, it means going out of your way to shop where the money stays. It means consciously boycotting giant stores like Walmart that bankrupt local businesses. With few exceptions, these huge enterprises have terrible labor policies and make enormous profits for faraway stockholders.

In Honolulu, Kokua Country Foods has flourished in Mo'ili'ili for thirty years. You join the co-op and become an owner with a voice in how the store is operated, and you get discounts on your purchases. The billionaires who are sons and daughters of Sam Walton in Arkansas don't get a bean.

With our own cooperative stores and restaurants and shops and studios and saving and loan huis, we can set up our own independence and show the spinning wheel, just as Gandhi did. We can follow our own example of demanding immersion schools and making them work, and demand other public services appropriate to the folks--for example, ho'oponopono and pu'uhonua for social offenders. Gandhi campaigned heart and soul for political sovereignty, but he knew that unless a rigorous kind of economic and social sovereignty is already in place, any campaign for political independence just leads to tiny concessions within the imperialist system, and those tiny concessions turn out to be big steps backwards, a truth we are seeing vividly today in Hawai'i Nei, to our sorrow. Independence and sovereignty are the ground of independence and sovereignty. Let's do it!

posted 2004.02.03

edited 2004.02.05

pau