THE HANDSTAND |
FEBRUARY-MARCH2010
|
Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence
By Rev. Martin Luther King
4 April 1967
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
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.
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 most 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. n 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
thosse 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 callling 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 the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth and falsehood,
For the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God's new Messiah,
Off'ring 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 portion 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.
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