By Rev. Martin Luther
King
By 1967, King had become the
country's most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a
staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed
militaristic. In his "Beyond Vietnam" speech
delivered at New York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 -- a
year to the day before he was murdered -- King called the
United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the
world today."
Time magazine called the
speech "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for
Radio Hanoi," and the Washington Post declared that King
had "diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country,
his people."
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 desperately
for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every
plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled
residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic
words: "Too late." There is an invisible book of
life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect.
"The moving finger writes, and having writ moves
on..." We still have a choice today; nonviolent
coexistence or violent co-annihilation.
We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways
to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the
developing world -- a world that borders on our doors. If we
do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and
shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess
power without compassion, might without morality, and strength
without sight.
Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long
and bitter -- but beautiful -- struggle for a new world. This
is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait
eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great?
Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message
be that the forces of American life militate against their
arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will
there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity
with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever
the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it
otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human
history.
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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