Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence

[Guest guest]

This writing shows a remarkable ability that I wish I had..

 

Every language always invents the words that we needed TO LATE.

 

The Ability to use yesterdays words to share tomorrows thoughts is a rare gift.

 

 

 

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.

 

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/058.html

 

Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence

By Rev. Martin Luther King

 

 

 

http://pets.care2.com/

 

" The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men. " --

Plato

" Providing health care to all Iraqis is sound policy. Providing

health care to all Americans is socialism. " -- anon