Opening Remarks—Martin Luther King Day Chapel Service
Daniel F. Sullivan—January 20, 2003

There are two things I want to say to you today. The first is to urge you to read carefully as much as you can of the January/February 2003 issue of The Other Side Chaplain Kathleen Buckley and Director of Multicultural Affairs Rance Davis have provided for each of you in attendance today. In it the complicated, imperfect, dynamic and powerfully transforming leader we are here to remember and honor today comes alive in honest portraits where none look through rose-colored glasses but all find good reasons for the attention we give Martin Luther King, Jr. this day. You will find things like this, from the introduction by Dee Dee Risher:

Our exploration of King’s life reminds us that we must be willing to let our heroes be flawed and struggling, at our sides and not over our heads. The various chronicles of King’s life are candid about his humanness. King and others in the movement were traditional in their views of women and often dismissive of their contributions. His sexual infidelities have been widely reported. He talked candidly about his own cowardice. We need to let him be human. When we do, we might discover in him some of the struggles, failures, and losses of our own lives.

Let me also quote to you from the article by Vincent Harding:

"With the approach of another national holiday in his honor, the predominant public image of Martin Luther King, Jr. will again be the 1963 March on Washington. We will be inundated with the iconic scene: The Black Baptist preacher announces to the nation and the world, in unparalleled, magnificent oratory, “I Have a Dream!”

Truly, that hot August day in the nation’s capital almost forty years ago is hallowed historical ground in the slow unfolding of the promise of American democracy. Both the man and that moment merit celebration. But our manner of celebrating reveals a deeply flawed and distorted understanding of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Brother Martin spent a fair amount of time in jail, but his worst imprisonment may be how his own nation has frozen him in that moment in 1963. Our national memory wants that triumphant, sun-drenched hero to stay right there, static, bound to the podium before the adoring crowds. We want to be lulled into contentment by his beautiful words, his familiar cadences. We want to keep him safely, unthreateningly, on a pedestal.

Our fixation on Martin’s “Dream” is symptomatic of a dangerous collective amnesia. We insist on approaching King in a way that makes him easy to handle; we want King to fit our agendas. Increasingly, the nation wants to package him, market him—and thereby ignore him. The poet, Carl Wendell Himes, Jr. who was only in his twenties when Martin was assassinated, articulated this domestication of King eloquently: Now that he is safely dead / Let us praise him / build monuments to his glory / sing hosannas to his name. / Dead men make / such convenient heroes: They cannot rise / to challenge the images / we would fashion from their lives. / And besides, / it is easier to build monuments / than to make a better world."

I hope those snippets will indeed entice you into the whole.

The second thing I want to say to you is that it is indeed “easier to build monuments than to make a better world.” I have been struggling a great deal, most painfully, in recent months with the question of what I am going to do personally to try to stop our nation, under the leadership of our president, from going down roads that I believe are disastrous for pursuit and attainment of the kind of just and humane world to which Martin Luther King, Jr., no matter his personal imperfections, devoted his life. What I have decided is that I must at least speak publicly—for myself, and not on behalf of St. Lawrence University. Not to do so on this of all occasions—devoted as it is to the memory and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. would, I have concluded, be an act of cowardice. That decision leads me to the following brief and agonized cry of concern.

I believe it will be a colossal, perhaps unforgivable, error to undertake a war against Iraq for the reasons our president is presenting us. I am not a pacifist, though I do believe that the kind of non-violent revolution that King struggled to initiate can be very effective when undertaken in a country that has a conscience, and he believed America has a conscience. I am in awe of the moral and political genius that led Gandhi and King to use non-violent political action to such powerful effect but do not believe it is a strategy for all politics and all situations. America should, in my view, deliver sharp, focused counterforce against terrorists who attack us, because a response that is non-violent in principle will not appeal to the consciences of those responsible for terrorism.

But such a response is no long-term solution. In the long-term, as a nation, we protect ourselves best against terrorism by behaving in the world in a way that inspires respect, even affection. To earn that respect, we must first respect others, and we must seek to be true to our own highest national values, first at home where poverty and inequality are growing and hope for more an more Americans is diminishing, and then also in our dealings with other nations. To become an international bully, barging ahead with a narrow and convoluted view of our interests, while being insensitive to the legitimate interests and aspirations of the people of other nations, makes America itself a highly dangerous international weapon of mass destruction.

I have heard no arguments from the Bush administration that come even close to convincing me that a war now with Iraq would be a just war. The public opinion polls make clear that Americans see Saddam Hussein as a bad person. But they also make clear that, even if Iraq does possess weapons of mass destruction, a strong majority of Americans cannot see justice in the expenditure of American and other lives to unseat him in a pre-emptive way. Political moderates among us must speak out loudly and persistently, so that the administration cannot cast opposition to such a war as in any way a politically extreme position. We should make it clear that continued pursuit of the policies on which our president has embarked, in light of such strong and broad-based popular opposition, is political suicide. I pray that the president does not have to learn that lesson directly because, if he does, thousands of Americans and perhaps hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and others will have died for no just reason.

In addition, by undertaking huge and unnecessary expenditures to finance a war with Iraq which must necessarily divert federal funds from critical social and educational programs, by introducing a proposal for a further highly regressive federal tax cut that will force even larger cuts in our federal social safety net, by weighing in as it has in the affirmative action case against the University of Michigan currently before the Supreme Court, and by attacking head on the hard won rights of women to reproductive freedom, this administration shows a hard fist instead of the compassion and commitment to justice, inclusion, and fairness of its political rhetoric. Where indeed would the president be today, as Frank Rich suggested in Saturday’s New York Times, without the affirmative action policy at Yale that favors admission of the children of wealthy alumni? I do not believe the president is remotely in tune with mainstream America on these issues. His war posture and his tax policy are bad, not good, for business, and the St. Lawrence alumni I talk to around the country—especially those involved in international business—believe he is making a huge mistake. If he persists, we must turn him out of office.

Make no mistake. We live in very dangerous times. But a great deal of the danger we are in is because we—that is you, I and hundreds of thousands of others—are not standing up to the political machine our president has put in place. Martin Luther King, Jr. worried that he was a coward, but there is absolutely no doubt that he had the courage to speak truth to power. Each of us in our own way, guided by our own consciences, must do the same.

It is with a heavy heart that I feel I have to speak to you on these matters. They require far more development than I have been able to accomplish in these short remarks. None of this is simple. But I pray for a change of direction, and I wanted to share my growing worry about our country. I could not do otherwise on this day. I thank you for listening.