A Tragic Death Wish


January 30, 2013

This year’s Martin Luther King march to my neighborhood in honor of the great victim of gun violence, and the recent virtual murder of Dr. King’s spiritual heir Aaron Swartz by federal authorities

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death… There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from re-ordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

-Dr. Martin Luther King, Riverside Church NYC, April 4, 1967