United States: Greatest purveyor of violence
Many of the youngsters may not be fully
aware of Martin Luther King and Vietnam War. However the US war mania is evident
today if one looks at the role it has been playing In Arabian Peninsula, North
Africa, Afghanistan and even Iran and Pakistan. This speech of Martin Luther
King may be long but each word has to be read and understood by the US tax payers
whose money is used in spreading wars and also by those who are victim of US
war mongering.
By 1967, Martin Luther King had become the
country's most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of
overall US foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic. In his "Beyond
Vietnam" speech delivered at New York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 ‑
a year to the day before he was murdered ‑ King called the United States
"the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." Time magazine
called the speech "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio
Hanoi," and the Washington Post declared that King had "diminished
his usefulness to his cause, his country and his people."
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 statements 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.
The truth of these words is beyond doubt but the mission to
which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of
inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's
policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great
difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom
and in the surrounding world. Moreover when the issues at hand seem as
perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict we are always
on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.
Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of
the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony,
but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to
our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely
this is the first time in our nation's history that a significant number of its
religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth
patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of
conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us.
If it is, let us trace its movement well and pray that our own inner being may
be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the
darkness that seems so close around us.
Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the
betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as
I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many
persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their
concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: Why are you speaking about
war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil
rights don't mix, they say. Aren't you hurting the cause of your people, they
ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their
concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the
inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their
questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.
In the light of such tragic misunderstandings, I deem it of
signal importance to try to state clearly, and I trust concisely, why I believe
that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church -- the church in Montgomery,
Alabama, where I began my pastorate -- leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.
I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to
my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National
Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia.
Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total
situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam.
Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front
paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they can play in a successful
resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reason to be
suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give
eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without
trustful give and take on both sides.
Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the
NLF, but rather to my fellow Americans, who, with me, bear the greatest
responsibility in ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both
continents.
The Importance of Vietnam
Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have
seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision.
There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the
war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A
few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if
there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white --
through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings.
Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and
eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad
on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies
in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to
draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I
was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack
it as such.
Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place
when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the
hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and
their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative
to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been
crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee
liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and
East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching
Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation
that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch
them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize
that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent
in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.
My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness,
for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last
three years -- especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the
desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails
and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my
deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes
most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so
-- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses
of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their
questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against
the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken
clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own
government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for
the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be
silent.
For those who ask the question, "Aren't you a civil
rights leader?" and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for
peace, I have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save
the soul of America." We were convinced that we could not limit our vision
to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that
America would never be free or saved from itself unless the descendants of its
slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we
were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written
earlier:
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!
Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has
any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present
war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read
Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men
the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America
will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of
our land.
As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health
of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me
in 1964; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a
commission -- a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for
"the brotherhood of man." This is a calling that takes me beyond
national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live
with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the
relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I
sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could
it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men -- for
Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white,
for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in
obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What
then can I say to the "Vietcong" or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful
minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with
them my life?
Finally, as I try to delineate for you and for myself the
road that leads from Montgomery to this place I would have offered all that was
most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share
with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of
race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood, and
because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially for his
suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them.
This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of
us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and
deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and
positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims
of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands
can make these humans any less our brothers.
Strange Liberators
And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to
understand and respond to compassion my mind goes constantly to the people of
that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the junta
in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war
for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them too because it is
clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt
is made to know them and hear their broken cries.
They must see Americans as strange liberators. The
Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1945 after a combined
French and Japanese occupation, and before the Communist revolution in China.
They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration
of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them.
Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony.
Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not
"ready" for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly
Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long.
With that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking
self-determination, and a government that had been established not by China
(for whom the Vietnamese have no great love) but by clearly indigenous forces
that included some Communists. For the peasants this new government meant real
land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.
For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of
Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the
French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam.
Before the end of the war we were meeting eighty percent of
the French war costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu,
they began to despair of the reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged
them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even
after they had lost the will. Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of
this tragic attempt at recolonization.
After the French were defeated it looked as if independence
and land reform would come again through the Geneva agreements. But instead
there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the
temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one
of the most vicious modern dictators -- our chosen man, Premier Diem. The
peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly routed out all opposition,
supported their extortionist landlords and refused even to discuss
reunification with the north. The peasants watched as all this was presided
over by U.S. influence and then by increasing numbers of U.S. troops who came
to help quell the insurgency that Diem's methods had aroused. When Diem was
overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military
dictatorships seemed to offer no real change -- especially in terms of their
need for land and peace.
The only change came from America as we increased our troop
commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept and
without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and
received regular promises of peace and democracy -- and land reform. Now they
languish under our bombs and consider us -- not their fellow Vietnamese --the
real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of
their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely
met. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. So they go --
primarily women and children and the aged.
They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million
acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas
preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with
at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one
"Vietcong"-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of
them -- mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the
children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like
animals. They see the children, degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food.
They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for
their mothers.
What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the
landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning
land reform? What do they think as we test our latest weapons on them, just as
the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps
of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be
building? Is it among these voiceless ones?
We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the
family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have
cooperated in the crushing of the nation's only non-Communist revolutionary
political force -- the unified Buddhist church. We have supported the enemies
of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and
killed their men. What liberators?
Now there is little left to build on -- save bitterness.
Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our
military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call fortified
hamlets. The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on
such grounds as these? Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for
them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These too are our brothers.
Perhaps the more difficult but no less necessary task is to
speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National
Liberation Front -- that strangely anonymous group we call VC or Communists?
What must they think of us in America when they realize that we permitted the
repression and cruelty of Diem which helped to bring them into being as a
resistance group in the south? What do they think of our condoning the violence
which led to their own taking up of arms? How can they believe in our integrity
when now we speak of "aggression from the north" as if there were
nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge
them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with
violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we
must understand their feelings even if we do not condone their actions. Surely
we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we
must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their
greatest acts.
How do they judge us when our officials know that their
membership is less than twenty-five percent Communist and yet insist on giving
them the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are
aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam and yet we appear ready to
allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel
government will have no part? They ask how we can speak of free elections when
the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta. And they are
surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without
them -- the only party in real touch with the peasants. They question our
political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they
will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant. Is our nation
planning to build on political myth again and then shore it up with the power
of new violence?
Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and
nonviolence when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his
questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed
see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may
learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the
opposition.
So, too, with Hanoi. In the north, where our bombs now
pummel the land, and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but
understandable mistrust. To speak for them is to explain this lack of
confidence in Western words, and especially their distrust of American
intentions now. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence against
the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the French
commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness of
the colonial armies. It was they who led a second struggle against French
domination at tremendous costs, and then were persuaded to give up the land
they controlled between the thirteenth and seventeenth parallel as a temporary
measure at Geneva. After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent
elections which would have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united
Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed again.
When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things
must be remembered. Also it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered
the presence of American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been the
initial military breach of the Geneva agreements concerning foreign troops, and
they remind us that they did not begin to send in any large number of supplies
or men until American forces had moved into the tens of thousands.
Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth
about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president
claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has
watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has
surely heard of the increasing international rumors of American plans for an
invasion of the north. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are
doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps only his sense of
humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the
world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor weak
nation more than eight thousand miles away from its shores.
At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried
in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless on Vietnam and to
understand the arguments of those who are called enemy, I am as deeply
concerned about our troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that
what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process
that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We
are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short
period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really
involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a
struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we
are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create hell for the
poor.
This Madness Must Cease
Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a
child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those
whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture
is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double
price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as
a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have
taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great
initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours.
This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of
Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words: "Each day the war goes on
the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those
of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into
becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so
carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the
process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of
America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but
the image of violence and militarism."
If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the
mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. It will
become clear that our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American colony
and men will not refrain from thinking that our maximum hope is to goad China
into a war so that we may bomb her nuclear installations. If we do not stop our
war against the people of Vietnam immediately the world will be left with no
other alternative than to see this as some horribly clumsy and deadly game we
have decided to play.
The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not
be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the
beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the
life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready
to turn sharply from our present ways.
In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we
should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war. I would like
to suggest five concrete things that our government should do immediately to
begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this
nightmarish conflict:
End all bombing in North and South Vietnam
Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will
create the atmosphere for negotiation.
Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing
our military buildup in Thailand and our interference in Laos.
Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has
substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any
meaningful negotiations and in any future Vietnam government.
Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance
with the 1954 Geneva agreement.
Part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in
an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new
regime which included the Liberation Front. Then we must make what reparations
we can for the damage we have done. We must provide the medical aid that is
badly needed, making it available in this country if necessary.
Protesting the War
Meanwhile, we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task
while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment.
We must continue to raise our voices if our nation persists in its perverse
ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out
every creative means of protest possible.
As we counsel young men concerning military service we must
clarify for them our nation's role in Vietnam and challenge them with the
alternative of conscientious objection. I am pleased to say that this is the
path now being chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma mater,
Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in
Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover I would encourage all ministers
of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as
conscientious objectors. These are the times for real choices and not false
ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our
nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide
on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.
There is something seductively tempting about stopping there
and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade
against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter the struggle, but I wish to go
on now to say something even more disturbing. The war in Vietnam is but a
symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore
this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy- and
laymen-concerned committees for the next generation. They will be concerned
about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia.
They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching
for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless
there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. Such
thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the
living God.
In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it
seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution.
During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which
now has justified the presence of U.S. military "advisors" in
Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts
for the counter-revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells
why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and why
American napalm and green beret forces have already been active against rebels
in Peru. It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F.
Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make
peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our
nation has taken -- the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible
by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the
immense profits of overseas investment.
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.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question
the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one
hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will
be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road
must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and
robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more
than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes
to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true
revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty
and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see
individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa
and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social
betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just." It will
look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say:
"This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has
everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true
revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war:
"This way of settling differences is not just." This business of
burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans
and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally
humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically
handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom,
justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money
on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual
death.
America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world,
can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a
tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering 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 with bruised hands until we
have fashioned it into a brotherhood.
This kind of positive revolution of values is our best
defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be
defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those
who shout war and through their misguided passions urge the United States to
relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand
wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not call everyone a Communist
or an appeaser who advocates the seating of Red China in the United Nations and
who recognizes that hate and hysteria are not the final answers to the problem
of these turbulent days. We must not engage in a negative anti-communism, but
rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense
against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must
with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity and
injustice which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and
develops.
The People are
Important
These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old
systems of exploitation and oppression and out of the wombs of a frail world
new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot
people of the land are rising up as never before. "The people who sat in
darkness have seen a great light." We in the West must support these
revolutions. 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. This has driven many to feel
that only Marxism has the revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a
judgement against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the
revolutions we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture
the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring
eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful
commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores and
thereby speed the day when "every valley shall be exalted, and every
moutain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight and
the rough places plain."
A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties
must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an
overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their
individual societies.
This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond
one's tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing
and unconditional love for all men. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted
concept -- so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and
cowardly force -- has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man.
When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I
am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the
supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the
door which leads to ultimate reality. This
Hindu-Moslem-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is
beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John:
Let us love one another; for love is God and everyone that loveth is born of
God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. If we
love one another God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us.
Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the
day. We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar
of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising
tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and
individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee
says: "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life
and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope
in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last
word."
We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We
are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of
life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is
still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected
with a lost opportunity. The "tide in the affairs of men" does not
remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out deperately for time to pause in
her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached
bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic
words: "Too late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully
records our vigilance or our neglect. "The moving finger writes, and
having writ moves on..." We still have a choice today; nonviolent
coexistence or violent co-annihilation.
We must move past indecision to action. We must find new
ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world
-- a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act we shall surely be
dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those
who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength
without sight.
Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long
and bitter -- but beautiful -- struggle for a new world. This is the calling of
the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say
the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our
message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as
full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of
longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their
cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it
otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.
Courtesy: Information Clearing House
