David Swanson, World BEYOND War, May 21, 2023 READ

About a year-and-a-half before I was born down in midtown, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech up at Riverside Church called Beyond Vietnam. “A nation that continues year after year,” he said, “to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” He was well aware that the military was not being used in defense, but the language of war acceptance was by that point well-established. Now here we are over a half-century later, having long-ago approached, greeted, and gone beyond spiritual death, and we’re looking back from beyond the grave.