|
MLK AGAINST U.S. INVOLVEMENT IN THE
VIETNAM WAR - 1967
A Time to Break Silence
It follows the full text transcript of
Martin Luther King's A Time to Break Silence speech, delivered at the
Riverside Church in New York City, NY - April 4, 1967.
 |
Mr. Chairman,
ladies and gentlemen, |
I need not pause
to say how very delighted I am to be here
tonight, and how very delighted I am to see you
expressing your concern about the issues that
will be discussed tonight by turning out in such
large numbers. I also want to say that I
consider it a great honor to share this program
with Dr. Bennett, Dr. Commager, and Rabbi
Heschel, some of the most distinguished leaders
and personalities of our nation. And of course
it's always good to come back to Riverside
Church. Over the last eight years, I have had
the privilege of preaching here almost every
year in that period, and it's always a rich and
rewarding experience to come to this great
church and this great pulpit.
I come to this
great magnificent house of worship tonight
because my conscience leaves me no other choice.
I join you in this meeting because I am in
deepest agreement with the aims and work of the
organization that 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
perplexing 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, and
pray that our 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 the 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 misunderstanding, I deem it of signal
importance 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 must play in the successful resolution
of the problem. While they both may have
justifiable reasons 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 National
Liberation Front, but rather to my fellow
Americans.
Since I am a preacher by calling, 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 this program broken and
eviscerated as if it were some idle political
plaything on 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 a 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 hardly
live on the same block in Chicago. 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 ghettos 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 the 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 until 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 from 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 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 1954.* And I cannot forget that the Nobel
Peace Prize 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 explain 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. 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 the victims of our nation, for
those it calls "enemy," for no document from
human hands can make these humans any less our
brothers.
And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and
search within myself for ways to understand and
respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly
to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not
of the soldiers of each side, not of the
ideologies of the Liberation Front, 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 1954—in 1945 rather—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 their 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 Agreement. 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 and Diem ruthlessly rooted out all
opposition, supported their extortionist
landlords, and refused even to discuss
reunification with the North. The peasants
watched as all of this was presided over by
United States influence and then by increasing
numbers of United States 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
dictators 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
the 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 on 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 out 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 noncommunist 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.
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 a 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 the United States of 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
was 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 not have a 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 real 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 upon the power of a
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
worlds, and especially their distrust of
American intentions now. In Hanoi are the men
who led this 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 could have surely brought Ho Chi
Minh to power over a unified Vietnam, and they
realized they had been betrayed again. When we
ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these
things must be considered.
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 Agreement
concerning foreign troops. They remind us that
they did not begin to send troops in large
numbers and even supplies into the South 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 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 hundred, or
rather, eight thousand miles away from its
shores.
At this point I should make it clear that while
I have tried to give a voice to the voiceless in
Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those
who are called "enemy," I am as deeply concerned
about our own 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 a hell for the poor.
Surely 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 destroy, whose culture is being subverted.
I speak for the poor in America who are paying
the double price of smashed hopes at home, and
dealt 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 one who loves America, to the leaders of our
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, and I quote:
Each day the
war goes on the hatred increased in the
hearts 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. 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
horrible, 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 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 to begin the long
and difficult process of extricating ourselves
from this nightmarish conflict:
1. End all bombing
in North and South Vietnam.
2. Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope
that such action will create the atmosphere for
negotiation.
3. Take immediate steps to prevent other
battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing
our military buildup in Thailand and our
interference in Laos.
4. 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 any
future Vietnam government.
5. 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.
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
and our lives if our nation persists in its
perverse ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to
match actions with words by seeking out every
creative method 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 a path now 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.
Now 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 that 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, 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. So 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 has now justified the
presence of U.S. military advisors in Venezuela.
This need to maintain social stability for our
investments accounts for the
counterrevolutionary action of American forces
in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters
are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia
and why American napalm and Green Beret forces
have already been active against rebels in Peru.
It is with such activity 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 investments. I am
convinced that if we are to get on to the right
side of the world revolution, we as a nation
must undergo a radical revolution of values. We
must rapidly begin, 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, extreme 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 comes to see than 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 South 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 hand 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 the veins
of peoples 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
engage in a negative anticommunism, 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.
These are revolutionary times. All over the
globe men are revolting against old systems of
exploitation and oppression, and out of the
wounds 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 a
revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a
judgment against our failure to make democracy
real and follow through on the revolutions that
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 mountain and
hill shall be made low; 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 worldwide 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
mankind. This oft misunderstood, this oft
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'm not speaking of that
force which is just emotional bosh. 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-Muslim-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 every one 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." Unquote.
We are now faced with the fact, my friends, 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 flood—it ebbs. We may cry out
desperately for time to pause in her passage,
but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on.
Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues 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. Omar Khayyam is right: "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.
As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell
Lowell, eloquently stated:
Once to every
man and nation comes a moment do decide,
In the strife of truth and Falsehood, for
the good or evil side;
Some great cause,
God's new Messiah offering each the bloom or
blight,
And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that
darkness and that light.
Though the
cause of evil prosper, yet 'tis truth alone
is strong
Though her portions be the scaffold, and
upon the throne be wrong
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and
behind the dim unknown
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping
watch above his own.
And if we will only make the right choice, we
will be able to transform this pending cosmic
elegy into a creative psalm of peace. If we will
make the right choice, we will be able to
transform the jangling discords of our world
into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. If we
will but make the right choice, we will be able
to speed up the day, all over America and all
over the world, when justice will roll down like
waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.
More History
|
|
