On his last day alive, April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. sent the title of his upcoming Sunday sermon to his church in Atlanta: “Why America May Go to Hell.”
He had earlier said that “A nation that continues, year after year, to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
He had condemned nuclear weapons in 1959 at the age of 30. Dorothy Day condemned them in 1945. Nuclear weapons were condemned when Jesus made a peace offer which is still being extended: “My peace I give unto you – not as the world gives it.”
Dr. King died in 1968 in Tennessee, the year that the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty was born into existence. The U.S. became a signatory nation to the NPT whose provisions came into effect in 1970. But in 2015, the U.S. government has plans and military appropriations calculated to retain the antichrist U.S. government arsenal of nuclear weapons and to continue to proliferate them until at least calendar year 2080. From the year of the death of Dr. King and the birth of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1968 until 2080 is 112 years.
The United States government is in systemic noncompliance with a great many of its legal obligations as a consequence of the presence of Article VI in the United States Constitution. All of the international laws, treaties, agreements and understandings into which the U.S. government has entered are integral obligatory component parts of the U.S. Constitution.
On paper the U.S. is a lamb concerning the subject of torture. The U.S. government has become a signatory to many international legal documents illegalizing torture including:
1) The Hague Conventions
2) The Geneva Conventions
3) The 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and
4) The 1984 United Nations Convention on Torture
to name a few.
In 1890, the United States Supreme Court defined solitary confinement to be a form of torture. The United States Constitution as originally written prohibited cruel and unusual treatments and punishments (and still does). If torture is not cruel and unusual treatment or punishment, what is? The World War I era U.S. suffragette Alice Paul was unjustly arrested, jailed and force fed during her hunger strike as an inmate. The forced feeding of fasting/hunger striking prisoners has been defined to be a form of torture but it is still being used by the U.S. government employees who operate the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp in eastern Cuba.
Assassination campaigns are illegal. Various weapons in the U.S. government arsenal are illegal, including cluster bombs, nuclear weapons and depleted uranium munitions. The targeting and killing otherwise of unarmed noncombatant civilian men, women, children and babies by the unmanned killer drone aircraft is illegal.
The U.S. Constitution is not the Word of God. But some people take oaths to preserve, protect and defend it. The U.S. Presidential oath of office does not apparently use the word “observe” but it is clear that habitually U.S. presidents do not observe their legal obligations under the U.S Constitution.
Worse, the U.S. Constitution is being misused to hamstring efforts to bring about meaningful gun reform in the U.S. FBI statistics show that for some years now U.S. annual firearms deaths exceed 30,000 per year (all causes – homicides, police killings, suicides, accidentals, undetermineds, etc.). If the framers of the U.S. Constitution intended that their literary child should be used to prevent the work of bringing about a calendar year in which there are ZERO gun deaths in the U.S., THEN SHAME ON THE FRAMERS OF THE U.S. CONSTITUTION.
People in the U.S. have got to do better than pound on their chests and make loud lamentations when the firearms fatality body counts continue. “For lack of vision the people perish.” – The Word of God
What is being done to redeem this sad state of affairs?
We continue to hope for all things through Christ who strengthens us. Jesus miraculously raised a dead man to life by calling out:
“LAZARUS – COME FORTH!”
The spiritual death of the U.S. prophesied over 47 years ago by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. has come to pass. Uncle Sam is a dead pigeon. The divisions amongst the people of the U.S. arise from the fact of the presence among us of unGodly ones. But we can and must draw close together about essential matters relating to the Common Good. A household divided against itself cannot stand. We must join hands and call out:
‘UNCLE SAM – COME FORTH!”
Dr. King talked about the Rip Van Winkle story. Uncle Sam has been in a deathlike slumber since World War II.
A 2015 march from Ferguson, Missouri to the Lorraine Motel where Dr. King died; to the Oak Ridge Y-12 nuclear weapons of mass destruction proliferation site; to the Atlanta, Georgia tomb of Dr. King; to the U.S. Army torture and terrorist training school at Ft. Benning, Georgia; to the King’s Bay, Georgia Trident guided missiles nuclear weapons of mass destruction U.S. Navy submarine base; to the Trayvon Martin death site in Florida; to the Dr. King Memorial in Washington, D.C.; to the smoldering ruins of 2015 riot-torn Baltimore; to the Brooklyn, New York Bureau of Prisons site where my 85-year-old codefendent Sister Megan Rice SHCU is being unjustly imprisoned by the antichrist, failed, rogue, terrorist, millions-of-dead-people’s-blood-on-its-hands U.S. government.*
This kind of a march could have some redemptive influence on societal affairs. Appeals to reason, quotations of the Word of God, and mentioning the various international level playing field rule of law obligations cannot do any harm. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. addressed his letter from a Birmingham Jail mostly to his fellow clergy – men who refused to prioritize matters of social justice in their use of their Christian pulpits. But Jesus said, “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and its justice.” And Dr. King, a true prophet of God, said, “Injustice anywhere in the world is a threat to justice everywhere in the world.”
* Michael Walli, Sr. Megan Rice and Greg Boertje-Obed – the Transform Now Plowshares – were suddenly released from prison on May 16, a week after Michael Walli mailed this to the Nuclear Resister. It will be included in the upcoming June issue of the Nuclear Resister. For a free sample copy, send your mailing address to nukeresister@igc.org