A Day of Sober Stock-Taking, as Real Battles Are Ignored : Martin Luther King: Everything that he stood for is again under siege as war-makers are celebrated and the poor do their fighting.

President Bush has given “D-Day” new meaning. At the same time, he deliberately desecrated the day dedicated to the nation’s only celebrated symbol of nonviolent resolution of conflict.

Declaring a deadline for war on Jan. 15, the day of the birth of the man who is known as one of this century’s premier purveyors of peace and justice, effectively served the interests of the evil forces in our land who seek to do violence to Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream and who live for the day when his birthday is no longer a federal holiday. In Dr. King’s words, when evil people plot, good people must plan.

Thank God that Colin Powell, the nation’s first African-American chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had the respect and the sense not to serve as the grand marshal of the sixth annual King parade in Atlanta. Even before the hostilities began in the Persian Gulf, the African-American community was already divided over the propriety of America’s top military man leading the parade (which Powell had originally squeezed in between visits to Saudi Arabia) in honor of the “drum major of peace and justice.” It was as if the parade planners forgot the extraordinary anti-war speech, “Beyond Vietnam,” that Dr. King delivered on April 4, 1967, at New York’s historic Riverside Church, exactly one year before he was assassinated. Had those who, no doubt, love the memory and the message of Dr. King allowed this to happen without protest, we who are advocates of peace and justice would have become accomplices in the desecration of the memory, the message and the man.

Is it that we have such short memories or is it that we have not made sense of the aftermath of the Vietnam War?

Contrary to popular myth, war will not bring us out of economic recession; the costs are too high.

I think Dr. King was correct that the War on Poverty was supplanted by the war in Indochina. At the height of the struggle for human and civil rights in the United States, the nation’s attention was conveniently diverted from freedom, justice, equality and equity here at home while three Presidents were preoccupied with the pursuit of democracy in places most Americans had never heard of. Now, 17 years after the Vietnam War was symbolically ended, local government across America is too strapped by meager resources to fight problems that are systemic in nature and national in scope.

It is seldom acknowledged, but the impact of the Vietnam War on communities throughout the nation was devastating.

Nowhere is this more obvious than among African-American males, who accounted for a disproportionate number of Vietnam casualties. It is no coincidence that the African-American substance-abuse crisis escalated shortly after the “end” of the Vietnam War. Furthermore, the rash of recent reports on the shocking incarceration rates among black men is a disturbing reminder of the high number of inmates or parolees who are Vietnam veterans. Take note: These men are the fathers of a generation that many claim has been lost.

Is it any wonder? The stories of men who frequent the veterans’ center here in South-Central Los Angeles are sobering. This is hardly to cast aspersion on the veterans, but simply to understand the crisis in which we find ourselves and how the war in the Persian Gulf presents the crisis anew, with the unprecedented number of African-Americans in the military owing to the poverty draft (the armed forces being the employer of last resort).

The range of problems that plague urban areas such as ours--high crime rates, affordable-housing shortages, ethnic strife, joblessness, high illiteracy rates, limited economic development opportunities, drug addiction and on and on--at minimum require dedication. They also require informed responses to the issues and commitment to the goal of peace and justice, sustaining life rather than destroying it, and taking responsibility for our actions.

This is the legacy of struggle of Dr. King. These are the social ills on which we must declare a war and to which there can be no conscientious objection.