Martin Luther King Jr. once warned of the ‘drum-major instinct.’ It threatens our nation today.

The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington D.C., as seen on Dec. 2, 2018. (Brett Bowers via Getty Images)

In recent weeks, the U.S. government punched a hole in Venezuela’s national defense and kidnapped its president, pirated an oil tanker and continued to threaten Greenland in a move that could destroy NATO, the only organization standing between an aggressive Russia and the European Union. 

This recent spate of colonialist jingoism feels like a wall in a byzantine maze crumbling and connecting a different but similar past to a present that follows tragic behavioral patterns. Recent events may feel different, but they carry echoes from generations past. 

Nearly 60 years ago, in a sermon entitled “The Drum-Major Instinct,” the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. preached on the mentality at the center of such violent international escapades. As he said in the sermon: “The parallels are frightening.” 

This instinct we all share — a desire for recognition, distinction and greatness — gets perverted in a most sinister way in the quest for international dominance. What troubled the world then, King said, stemmed from nations engaging in “a bitter, colossal contest for supremacy.”

He did not spare the United States in his critique.

“This is where we are drifting, and we are drifting there because nations are caught up with the drum-major instinct: I must be first, I must be supreme, our nation must rule the world. And I am sad to say that the nation in which we live is the supreme culprit,” he said. 

He continued: “And I’m going to continue to say it to America, because I love this country too much to see the drift that it has taken. God didn’t call America to do what she’s doing in the world now. God didn’t call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war as the war in Vietnam. And we are criminals in that war. We have committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I’m going to continue to say it. And we won’t stop it because of our pride and our arrogance as a nation.”

But King encouraged listeners to hold onto the desire for greatness, saying that “it’s a good instinct if you use it right.”

He continued: “Keep feeling the need for being important. Keep feeling the need for being first. But I want you to be first in love. I want you to be first in moral excellence. I want you to be first in generosity.”

His advice still rings true but has gone widely unheeded.

World events can feel linear, particularly to the historically uninitiated absorbing current events without context. Every development feeling like some fresh new outrage.

America’s colonial past spans continents and centuries. Current threats to Venezuela and to Greenland seem fresh. But the history and wisdom used to explain it can take on a circular shape or even an figure eight balanced on its side, a reflection of timeless complexity and timeless continuity.

I once had a younger — but in some ways wiser — boss who introduced me to a Lucile Clifton poem about the Mississippi River emptying into the Gulf and the Gulf entering the sea, “all of them carrying yesterday forever on their white-tipped backs, all of them dragging forward tomorrow.”

The past is always flowing Clifton said, and every water “is the same water coming round.” 

But as remains true today, “someone is standing on the edge of this river, staring into time, whispering mistakenly: only here. Only now.” 

Whispering “only here, only now” under current circumstances registers as a lack of alarm. It’s devoting more attention to symptoms rather than to core issues, issues that really should transcend conservative or progressive labels. 

President Trump has said his own morality “is the only thing that can stop me. … I don’t need international law.” He’s suggested that Renee Good’s “disrespectful” attitude justified her fatal shooting at the hands of an ICE officer. 

Insipid “news” reporting focused on the Seal Team’s precision in capturing the Venezuelan leader, rather than on what the shattering of norms means in a world where frayed cables sustain a fragile balance of power.  

They may as well have asked, “Where did Maduro and his wife have the couch?” at the time of the overnight raid. 

Not enough people evaluate events transpiring around us with the requisite alarm. As King said, the parallels to the past are frightening. 

Mark McCormick is the former executive director of the Kansas African American Museum, a member of the Kansas African American Affairs Commission and former deputy executive director at the ACLU of Kansas. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.