The cold is finally lifting from Calgary. I just arrived home from listening to a wonderful mezzo-soprano tonight. I was also fortunate to be accompanied by a very pleasant and interesting womyn who first told me about the performance. So now, sitting in front of my computer, being warmed by my branded Starbucks/Nike/Google spaceheater I will again bring out the convention of a quote to spur the conversation. This time from Dr. Martin Luther King:

"My third reason [for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision] moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. 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 nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own 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 having first 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 hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent." -- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. New York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967

I have immense respect for Dr. King because he was out-right and completely non-violent, just like myself. Some think that non-violence is only for the weak. But the way he was harassed showed that he was what can only be characterized as a powerful man. He was not perfect but he probably would have been the first to admit it. The ultimate weakness of violence, this is, why violence never does solve anything, is that violence leads only to more violence. The most pressing and explicate example of this viscous cycle today is the Israel vs. Palestine conflict. There are counter arguments, at the deepest level mostly that destruction must always precede creation and that violence is inherent in nature. I must go from my gut and say I truly do not feel this way. Why must I blindly be lead by an academic? I have the view that humans create there own future and that the world is what we make it (Hegel's Philosophy of History studies this phenomenon). However deeper probing into this augment must be quitted for another day.

Some readers may be struck by how true the quote sounds even today. Has nothing changed from when Martin Luther King was shot? This is troubling but I am not discouraged. Noam Chomsky was asked what steps the USA should take to reduce global terrorism. He simply replied that the USA should stop taking part in terrorism and that this step in itself would reduce terrorism (examples of state sponsered terrorism by the USA since WWII are too numerous to state here). Why should the Vietnamese, or truly my generation's Vietnam: Iraq, want democracy when we are bombing and terrorizing them, or futhermore when we can't even promise that we've perfected democracy (or capitalism?). I want to reach further than my grasp.