A true revolution of values.

About five years ago, I was listening to the radio and I tuned in partway through the program. I could tell that they were broadcasting a speech and that it was one I had not heard before. The speaker explained why he opposed the Vietnam War, and it took me many minutes before I realized that it was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Because, while I had learned about him and the civil rights struggle in school, I had learned the most palatable version. The one that talked about how he believed in people being judged by the content of their character, and how he led a march on Washington, and how--if it wasn't for him--black kids and white kids would still be segregated in schools. Aside from the way that obscures what goes into movement-building and all the people who participate, which is a discussion in and of itself, I had learned about a version of Martin Luther King that did not present a challenge to the status quo today.

But that's only a sliver of his story. Here is a YouTube video with the audio of his speech explaining his opposition to the war. I want to pull out the few passages that resonate for me:

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through non-violent action; for they ask and write me, "So what about Vietnam?" They ask if our nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without first having spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence I cannot be silent.

[...]

This is a role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolutions impossible but refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that comes from the immense profits of overseas investments. I'm convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, militarism and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered.

[...]

True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth with righteous indignation. It will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

Here is the transcript linked to on the YouTube page, which is actually more complete than the audio (which seems to have clips edited out).

Hero complexes.

Watching a segment on Paul Farmer on 60 Minutes... Since reading Mountains Beyond Mountains a few years ago, my first reaction to anything having to do with Paul Farmer is always positive. But I'm instinctively suspicious of how 60 Minutes might decide to portray him and his work and the issues.

...pause to finish watching the segment...

My first thought is that I sorta want to read Mountains Beyond Mountains again. Because when I read it the first time, I was so fundamentally moved and inspired. Not only by his vision and his understanding of what the right to health means (that no one should be denied the right to health care because of the poverty that results from the accident of their birth) but the network of people that were attracted to that vision and who helped him to build it.

And Paul Farmer is an inspiring person, if only because of his strategy for building his organization or for making it possible to deliver health care. In the 60 Minutes segment, they talk about how Partners in Health, the organization he co-founded, will survive after he is gone because it is run by Haitian physicians in Haiti and Rwandan physicians in Rwanda and so on. PIH depends on community health workers to reach out to patients living in rural or difficult-to-reach areas. So in the end, it's not really about Paul Farmer. His vision would never have come about if there wasn't an army of people equally committed to that vision.

But we can never talk about it that way. By "it," I suppose that I mean Changing the World or however we might put it. It's why we talk about any great change in terms of the great people who represented that change. So Martin Luther King, Jr. becomes a stand-in for the civil rights movement, or Mandela for the anti-apartheid movement, or Gandhi for the independence movement. And we forget that the change they represent would have meant nothing without a mass movement of people who believed in the same ideas.

It's more exciting to tell a "hero" story, though. About the strength of an individual who changes the course of history. And the reality is not quite as "sellable." That change comes about in usually mundane ways, created by people who will be generally forgotten.