Leid Stories—Creating More and More Wars So We Can Commemorate Those Who Die In Them—05.28.18

It is Memorial Day. A dwindled portion of the country will hold parades honoring those who died while serving in or defending America’s various wars; most, however, will be enjoying a long weekend of backyard barbecuing and hunting for good buys at start-of-summer sales.

Memorial Day has all but ceased to be a sobering moment when, as the country honors generations of war dead it also reexamines its bloodlust for war. But there are signs that the all-people’s anti-war resistance movement of the 1960s is gaining renewed strength in a new generation taking on the warmongering administration of President Donald Trump.

Leid Stories today shares a speech by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in which he warns about six key casualties of war. The speech was made at the height of King’s anti-war activism in 1967, the year before he was assassinated.