There is a way to live without terror: Martin Luther King

There is a way to live without terror: Martin Luther King
Special Correspondent

AMBASSADOR OF PEACE: Martin Luther King III, addressing students of P.S.B.B. Senior Secondary School in Chennai on Wednesday. —
CHENNAI: Half a century ago, Martin Luther King Jr. adopted Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violence as his key weapon in the fight against segregation and racial discrimination in America. Today, his son wants to adapt the policy to win the war against global terrorism.
“We have got to find out what makes them terrorists…we have to show them that there is a way for you to live and achieve happiness for your family without terror, without hurting others,” Martin Luther King III told city school students in Chennai on Wednesday. He is in the city, recreating the pilgrimage that his parents undertook to India 50 years ago.
Echoing his father’s attitude towards the segregationists of his era, Mr. King said the only way to fight terror was its victims extending the olive branch and showing love to the very people hurting them. “The example of non-violence ultimately transforms lives,” he told a student from Vidyodaya Matriculation and Higher Secondary School, who asked how non-violence could be used to combat terror. “We need to show them that we can live together as brothers so that we won’t have to perish together as fools.”
Mr. King and members of his organisation, Realising the Dream, will travel to Kenya, Israel and the other troubled parts of the world to spread the same message before returning to India in a year’s time.
He doesn’t think the new wars needing a non-violent arsenal means that the old battles have been won. Barack Obama’s election as President of the United States is one aspect of the dream fulfilled, a sign that his country has come a long way in fighting racism. However, Mr. King pointed to a controversial cartoon seeming to depict Mr. Obama as a chimpanzee published in the New York Post last week as evidence that that battle was not ever yet.
The situation was even worse when it came to the other two aspects of the historic, “I Have A Dream” speech. “In relation to poverty and militarism, we have made almost no progress,” he said in a blunt assessment. The US economy was built around militarism, he said, adding, “We have to build an economy around peace.”
His claim to fame may lie in the past, anchored around those images of the young boy at his father’s funeral, but Mr. King is taking the message to the future. “His words will resonate for decades to come, just like his father’s,” said a Padma Seshadri Bala Bhavan student after Mr. King urged students toward a life-long commitment to love, non-violence and becoming the best they can be.
For the 700 students crowded into the PSBB auditorium, he seemed to provide a slogan for the future as he led them in a rousing chant: spread the word, have you heard, all around the world – we are going to be a great generation.
From THE HINDU 26, February 2009