King's nonviolent army

MARTIN LUTHER King Day can be an uncomfortable holiday. On President's Day there's little traction in wondering how George Washington or Abraham Lincoln would handle the Iraq war or homeland security. But ask what King would do and a deep well surges.

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How would King have applied the principle of nonviolence after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11? What would he say about the war in Iraq and homeland security? The world will never have answers. But the principles that King believed in leave a moral standard that is still relevant.

In his book "Why We Can't Wait," King writes of recruiting volunteers for the "nonviolent army."

"We would not send anyone out to demonstrate who had not convinced himself and us that he could accept and endure violence without retaliating." He asked people to give up the weapons they carried to defend themselves. "We proved that we possessed the most formidable weapon of all -- the conviction that we were right. We had the protection of our knowledge that we were more concerned about realizing our righteous aims than about saving our skins."

King wrote that the nonviolent army had no supplies except sincerity, no uniform but determination, and no arsenal except faith. "It was an army that would sing but not slay."

He made this huge request of ordinary people, asking them to master the disciplines of nonviolence and sacrifice. He set the example, living on the front line, seemingly aware that he would not live to see the world he so passionately sought to create.

Today the country is crowded with hedgers, simplifiers, and obfuscators. It is lacking leaders who are great educators. King not only shared his moral convictions, he shared the evolution of his thinking, weaving together racial equality and economic justice, national stability and how it was threatened by the war in Vietnam.

Speaking in New York City in 1967, King said of the Vietnam War: "Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war." He spoke of needing to break the betrayal of his own years of silence, saying the war drained the United States of the resources to address its own problems and was destroying the lives and landscape of Vietnam.

He called for a "revolution of values," saying "our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies."

Forty years later the facts of American life are different. But the need for setting a global course is strikingly similar. The message of this holiday: We cannot be comfortable, given the work that must still be done.