Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence
By Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King,
Jr.
Rev. King delivered this speech at a meeting of Clergy and
Laity Concerned to a crowded Riverside Church in New York City.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
And if we will only make the right choice, we will be able
to transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of peace. If we
will make the right choice, we will be able to transform the jangling discords
of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. If we will but make the
right choice, we will be able to speed up the day, all over America and all
over the world, when justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like
a mighty stream.
http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/documentsentry/doc_beyond_vietnam/
