The pervasive, intrusive, and insistent nature of advertising these days bothers me. Why is it seemingly impossible to have an experience that isn’t somehow interrupted by someone trying to sell me something?

I get advertisements on my computer, over my telephone, in all major media, on the sides of busses, on clothing, coffee mugs, in my mail box, at the theater, at the movies, during the movies, during, now, as well as between programming segments on television. Sports arenas, buildings, and even educational edifices, instead of being named as they once were for people, are now named for companies. Because it’s good advertising. Clever ad agencies are promoting underground tactics such as paying people to use a product in public places. Kids watch advertising on school televisions on a service that the school district pays for. Airlines show advertisements on airplanes before the movie. And after. Never mind ads on billboards, grocery carts, bus stops, bumper stickers, restroom walls (!), the sides of buildings, elevators, and on and on and on.

In addition to how persistent advertisers are getting, consider the rising level hyperbole that has accompanied this growth. Sportscasters and new anchors breathlessly promote upcoming news stories with the kind of rhetoric that makes you think armageddon is coming and it’s going to be broadcast at 11! (Or 10, if you’re in a one-upped news market.) Music engineers are being pushed to compress their music more and more so that it sounds louder when it’s played at normal volume (see article here). Everyone is desperate to be heard through the noise that everyone else is making. Where will it end?

When something really important happens, how will we know? If news anchors can call a winter storm a “nightmare” and devote the kind of coverage to it that befits a surprise military strike, how will the viewing public be able to take that same station seriously when something really serious happens?

On today, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, KUOW played a “Speech delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City” entitled Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence. The text quoted herein was obtained at Hartford World Publishing’s World History Archives.

The speech is a sensitive, thoughtful, and carefully reasoned indictment of the war in Vietnam. It is not dogmatic or impolitic. It does not cater to fear; rather, it calls on our higher selves, our sense of responsibility, fairness, and justice.

King opens with what called him to action:
“I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join with you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent statement of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam”

He then explains his seven reasons for protesting the war in Vietnam, which I will only briefly summarize here:
1. The war pulls away resources that would otherwise go to help the poor in the US.
2. It manipulates the poor at home by sending the races to die together who are not allowed to live together in a segregated society.
3. It undermines the message that social change can be brought about by peaceful means.
4. The war in Vietnam poisons the soul of America, and those who care about America must therefore protest.
5. King’s winning of the Nobel Prize for Peace earlier that year was “a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for ‘the brotherhood of man.’”
6. And anyway, he says, even if he hadn’t won the Nobel Prize, it’s a Christian value to promote peace, to love and care for all men.
7. Finally, it is King’s calling to speak out in brotherhood for those who are “suffering and helpless.”

King then lays out a history of Vietnam’s struggles and the US’s involvement as early as 1945. He does so in the name of understanding the thought processes behind our so-called enemy. He goes to great pains to make clear that he does not condone the violent tactics of the Vietnamese. He attempts not to speak as their apologist, but to understand their side of the equation.