By Seán Sheehan

This week we celebrate the life and work of Martin
Luther King, Jr. It's a week that would have seen
the civil rights hero celebrate his 76th birthday.
It's also one of the few holiday weekends that
Madison Avenue has yet to brazenly co-opt. Now
while I can't say I'd be too surprised to see an ad
for a 'King Day Blowout sale: white Hummers, black
Hummers, same low price,' I do find it appropriate
that ad shills seem to be steering clear of one of
the 20th century's great opponents of extreme
materialism.

"Now hold on," you might be saying, "I thought Dr.
King stood up to racial inequality and military
aggression?" You'd be right, of course, but Dr.
King actually spoke of three intertwined problems --
racism, militarism, and materialism -- that needed
to be overcome if his beloved United States was to
fulfill the promise of the American Dream.

The promise of the original American Dream was
rooted in core American values such as freedom,
security, justice, and opportunity. It held that
everyone should have access to pursue a good life.
Unfortunately, in the second half of the twentieth
century these central values began to be corrupted
and replaced by more materialistic priorities. Dr.
King saw this corruption, recognized the disconnect
between "enough for all" and "excess for some," and
spoke out. In his 1967 "Beyond Vietnam" speech,
King attested:

"I am convinced that if we are to get on the right
side of the world revolution, we as a nation must
undergo a radical revolution of values. We must
rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented
society to a person-oriented society. When machines
and computers, profit motives and property rights
are considered more important than people, the
giant triplets of racism, materialism, and
militarism are incapable of being conquered."

This speech was not unique. Others referred to "the
triple evils of racism, extreme materialism, and
militarism." Interestingly, he also sometimes spoke
of "poverty, racism, and militarism" in the same
way. King's interchangeable use of "materialism"
and "poverty" is telling -- he clearly understood
that we live in a world of finite natural resources
and he obviously supported Gandhi's principle that
there is "enough for everyone's need but not for
everyone's greed." Were King alive to celebrate his
75th birthday, one can imagine that he might tout
the findings of researchers at the University of
British Columbia that we would need the resources
of four additional planets for everyone on earth to
live the lifestyle of the average North American.

OUR VALUES OR OUR STUFF?

King recognized that the increasingly materialistic
version of the American Dream was growing
incompatible with such the original dream's core
values. The conflict was particularly pronounced
when citizens in developing countries aspired
toward these American values only to have U.S.
political and corporate leaders thwart their
aspirations out of fear that it would raise the
cost of cheap consumer imports. King saw this as a
wholesale betrayal of the core values upon which
our nation was founded.

He once lamented: "It is a sad fact that, because
of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism,
and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the
Western nations that initiated so much of the
revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now
become the arch anti-revolutionaries."

Unfortunately, the change King observed in the
1960s has only become more entrenched in subsequent
decades. At the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de
Janeiro, the first President Bush staunchly
defended and defined America by its "more is
better" obsession when he declared to the world:
"The American way of life is not negotiable."

WHAT WE DO MATTERS

While he tackled issues of overwhelming proportion,
Dr. King's legacy is all about empowerment. Much
of his call to action simply involves reminding
people how powerful we really are, both as citizens
and as consumers. When overcoming racism,
materialism, and militarism seems hopelessly
idealistic, King reminds us that we are citizens of
the United States, and that "America, the richest
and most powerful nation in the world, can well
lead the way in this revolution of values."

When Madison Avenue tells us we're too small to
make a difference, King reminds us that individual
Americans together, even financially poor black
Americans, have a tremendous amount of consumer
power. In his "I've Been to the Mountaintop"
speech, King calls, "[Let us] Always anchor our
external direct action with the power of economic
withdrawal. Now, we are poor people, individually,
we are poor when you compare us with white society
in America. We are poor. Never stop and forget
that collectively, that means all of us together,
collectively we are richer than all the nations in
the world, with the exception of nine."

My organization, the Center for a New American
Dream, firmly agrees with Dr. King's assessment
that what we do matters. We work to pool citizen
power through our Step by Step program and consumer
power through our Conscious Consumer and
Institutional Procurement programs. Together we
push for products that have good value, are safe
for the environment, and promote the well-being of
the people at the other end of the production line.

THE DREAM LIVES ON

It goes without saying that Dr. King's messages are
entirely relevant four decades later. The good
news is that many world leaders are seizing upon
his teachings and working to make a difference.
For example, President Lula of Brazil reiterated
King's connections in a speech to the United
Nations this past September, stating: "Peace,
security, development, and social justice are
indivisible."

Even the president of the World Bank, James
Wolfensohn, echoes an understanding of King when he
states: 'We have a situation where 20% of the
world's population have 80% of the wealth, and the
other 80% has just 20%. If that's a situation that
leads to instability, then we are saying that that
instability will convey itself through migration,
through wars within countries and through crime and
terrorism.'

More and more leaders are recognizing the conflict
between core values and a 'more is better' way of
life and they're asking which is more important,
what really matters. As Wolfensohn's quote
demonstrates, some leaders are realizing that 'more
is better' does not provide happiness or security,
its not sustainable and, for most of the world, it
will never be attainable. We need a new dream. We
need a return to our core values.

Reprinted here with permission of the Center for the New American Dream www.newdream.org