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I combined three items into this announcement <span>about the 40th
anniversary of the Assassination of Dr. King</span>.<br>
<br>
Panel Discussion on reflections on Dr. King 40 years later<br>
Friday, 7pm at the Cultural Cafe<br>
76 Atherton Street<br>
<br>
Music & Poetry<br>
<br>
"I knew that I could never again raise my voice against<br>
the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without<br>
having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the
world today - my own government.."<br>
April 4th, 1967<br>
"A Time To Break The Silence"<br>
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.<br>
_____________________________<br>
Friday, <span>April 4th </span>will be the <span>40th anniversary of
the Assassination of Dr. King.</span> On this day, at <span>12 Noon,</span>
we ask that you take <span>a Moment of Silent Reflection.</span> We
also ask that you wear a <span>Green Ribbon </span>as a social
justice action, symbolizing the need for <span>Justice </span>and <span>Reconstruction</span>
for the victims and survivors of <span>Katrina </span>and <span>Rita.</span>
With this small action, we can keep this crisis in the forefront -
calling attention to the on going devastation that Black and poor
people are experiencing throughout the <span>Gulf Coast. </span>Break
the silence by encouraging your family, friends, classmates,
associates, church members and co-workers to wear a Green Ribbon in the
spirit of Dr. King and every person who stands for justice.<br>
<br>
Available on request <br>
<br>
1) A <span>Poster </span>(11 x 17) for the April 4th Moment of Silent
Reflection and Green Ribbon Campaign<br>
<br>
2) A <span>Flyer </span>(8
1/2 x 11) For the April 4th Moment of Silent Reflection and Green
Ribbon Campaign. (This flyer should be printed back to back and cut in
the middle).<br>
<br>
You can use your own creativity and make Green Ribbons.<br>
<br>
In Unity and Struggle<br>
<br>
Tony Menelik Van Der Meer <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:tmenelik@yahoo.com">tmenelik@yahoo.com</a><br>
<br>
Note:<br>
My students held a press conference today calling for a moment of
silent reflection on Friday, April 4th for the 40th anniversary of the
assassination of Dr. King. They also called on folks to take up the
Green Ribbon campaign. You can see it at<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLmST1dGy14&feature=email">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLmST1dGy14&feature=email</a><br>
<br>
Menelik<br>
<br>
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<div>______________________________<br>
Posted by Brian Corr <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated"
href="mailto:bcorr@umich.edu">bcorr@umich.edu</a>
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<p><b><span>Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence</span></b></p>
<p><i>Today is the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. Exactly one year before his death, on April 4, 1967 at
Riverside Church in New York City, Dr. King gave a speech that is less
well know than "I Have a Dream" -- but is much more powerful. The
entire speech is below, but here is one powerful paragraph, if you've
never read it: </i></p>
<p>"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."</p>
<p><i>Prof. Dale Bryan has written of that speech and placed it in its
historical and political context. "This initial sermon was immediately
considered by some of his closest friends, and since by many
historians, to have been his virtual death warrant. One year later to
the day, April 4, 1968, Rev. King was murdered in Memphis while
supporting city sanitation workers during their strike for fair wages
and better working conditions, for what is now considered environmental
justice. It is during that last year of his life, when he preached
about the immorality of the war and the 'spiritual death' awaiting
America from the government's massive investments in militarism rather
than in social needs and, that he became inconvenient. Rev. King saw
that his work for racial justice would never succeed without economic
justice and without global justice. With remarkable accuracy and
prescience, his analysis of the historical context for our war on
Vietnam led him to challenge Americans to forgo empire as a way of
life, to transform ourselves, and our society."</i></p>
<p><i>Our challenge is the mirror image of that which Dr. King had the
courage to face and address. I hope that we can find the courage to do
the same.</i> </p>
<i>You can also listen to the speech if you wish:</i> <i>The speech is
57 minutes long and may take a few minutes to download.</i>
<p><b><a
href="http://www.afsc.org/mlk/01%20MartinLutherKing19670404.mp3">Riverside
Church Speech:</a> </b><span><a
href="http://www.afsc.org/mlk/01%20MartinLutherKing19670404.mp3">http://www.afsc.org/mlk/01%20MartinLutherKing19670404.mp3</a>
(MP3 65.5MB)</span></p>
<div><span> </span></div>
<p><span></span></p>
<p><i>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></p>
<p>I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my
conscience leaves me no other choice. I join you in this meeting
because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the
organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned
about Vietnam. The recent statements of your executive committee are
the sentiments of my own heart, and I found myself in full accord when
I read its opening lines: "A time comes when silence is betrayal." And
that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>And 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 movements 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.</p>
<p>Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my
own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have
called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many
persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of
their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: "Why are you
speaking about the war, Dr. King?" "Why are you joining the voices of
dissent?" "Peace and civil rights don't mix," they say. "Aren't you
hurting the cause of your people," they ask? And when I hear them,
though I often understand the source of their concern, I am
nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the
inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling.
Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in
which they live.</p>
<p>In the light of such tragic misunderstanding, 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.</p>
<p>I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my
beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the
National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia.
Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation
and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam.
Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National
Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they must
play in the successful resolution of the problem. While they both may
have justifiable reasons to be suspicious of the good faith of the
United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact
that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on
both sides.</p>
<p>Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the National
Liberation Front, 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.</p>
<p>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 this 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.</p>
<p>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. And 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. And so
we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village,
but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in
Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation
of the poor.</p>
<p>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 ask -- and rightly so -- what about
Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of
violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted.
Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my
voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without
having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the
world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the
sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands
trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.</p>
<p>For those who ask the question, "Aren't you a civil rights leader?"
and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this
further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save the
soul of America." We were convinced that we could not limit our vision
to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction
that America would never be free or saved from itself until the
descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they
still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black
bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:</p>
<p>O, yes,<br>
I say it plain,<br>
America never was America to me,<br>
And yet I swear this oath --<br>
America will be!</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of
America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed
upon me in 1954; and I cannot forget that the Nobel 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'm
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?</p>
<p>And finally, as I try to explain for you and for myself the road
that leads from Montgomery to this place I would have offered all that
was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction
that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God.
Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of
sonship and brotherhood, 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.</p>
<p>This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who
deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and
deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined
goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the
voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls
"enemy," for no document from human hands can make these humans any
less our brothers.</p>
<p>And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for
ways to understand and respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly
to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of
each side, not of the ideologies of the Liberation Front, not of the
junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under
the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of
them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful
solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their
broken cries.</p>
<p>They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people
proclaimed their own independence in 1954 -- in 1945 rather -- after a
combined French and Japanese occupation and before the communist
revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they
quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document
of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to
support France in its reconquest of her former colony. Our government
felt then that the Vietnamese people were not ready for independence,
and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has
poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic
decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking
self-determination and a government that had been established not by
China -- for whom the Vietnamese have no great love -- but by clearly
indigenous forces that included some communists. For the peasants this
new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs
in their lives.</p>
<p>For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the
right of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the
French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam. Before the end
of the war we were meeting eighty percent of the French war costs. Even
before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair
of their reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our
huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after
they had lost the will. Soon we would be paying almost the full costs
of this tragic attempt at recolonization.</p>
<p>After the French were defeated, it looked as if independence and
land reform would come again through the Geneva Agreement. But instead
there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the
temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we
supported one of the most vicious modern dictators, our chosen man,
Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly
rooted 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 United States' influence and
then by increasing numbers of United States troops who came to help
quell the insurgency that Diem's methods had aroused. When Diem was
overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military
dictators seemed to offer no real change, especially in terms of their
need for land and peace.</p>
<p>The only change came from America, as we increased our troop
commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt,
inept, and without popular support. All the while the people read our
leaflets and received the regular promises of peace and democracy and
land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not
their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move sadly and
apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into
concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They
know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords
and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land
reform? What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them,
just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the
concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent
Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?</p>
<p>We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family
and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have
cooperated in the crushing of the nation's only noncommunist
revolutionary political force, the unified Buddhist Church. We have
supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted
their women and children and killed their men.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Perhaps a more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for
those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National
Liberation Front, that strangely anonymous group we call "VC" or
"communists"? What must they think of the United States of America when
they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem,
which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the
South? What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to
their own taking up of arms? How can they believe in our integrity when
now we speak of "aggression from the North" as if there 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.</p>
<p>How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership
is less than twenty-five percent communist, and yet insist on giving
them the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that
we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam, and yet we
appear ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized
political parallel government will not have a part? They ask how we can
speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and
controlled by the military junta. And they are surely right to wonder
what kind of new government we plan to help form without them, the only
party in real touch with the peasants. They question our political
goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they
will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant. Is our
nation planning to build on political myth again, and then shore it up
upon the power of new violence?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 could
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.</p>
<p>Also, it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered the
presence of American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been
the initial military breach of the Geneva Agreement concerning foreign
troops. They remind us that they did not begin to send troops in large
numbers and even supplies into the South until American forces had
moved into the tens of thousands.</p>
<p>Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about
the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president
claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh
has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and
now he has surely heard the increasing international rumors of American
plans for an invasion of the North. He knows the bombing and shelling
and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy.
Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears
the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it
drops thousands of bombs on a poor, weak nation more than eight
hundred, or rather, eight thousand miles away from its shores.</p>
<p>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 in Vietnam and
to understand the arguments of those who are called "enemy," I am as
deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it
occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not
simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies
face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the
process of death, for they must know after a short period there that
none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved.
Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a
struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize
that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create
a hell for the poor.</p>
<p>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 one who loves
America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this
war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.</p>
<p>This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam.
Recently one of them wrote these words, and I quote:</p>
<p>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 (unquote).</p>
<p>If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of
the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. If we do not
stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately, the world will
be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horrible,
clumsy, and deadly game we have decided to play. The world now demands
a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands
that we admit 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.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<p>Number one: End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.</p>
<p>Number two: Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such
action will create the atmosphere for negotiation.</p>
<p>Three: Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in
Southeast Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our
interference in Laos.</p>
<p>Four: Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation
Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a
role in any meaningful negotiations and any future Vietnam government.</p>
<p>Five: Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam
in accordance with the 1954 Geneva Agreement.</p>
<p>Part of our ongoing...part of our ongoing commitment might well
express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears
for his life under a new regime which included the Liberation Front.
Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done.
We must provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it
available in this country, if necessary. Meanwhile... meanwhile, we in
the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our
government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must
continue to raise our voices and our lives if our nation persists in
its perverse ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with
words by seeking out every creative method of protest possible.</p>
<p>As we counsel young men concerning military service, we must clarify
for them our nation's role in Vietnam and challenge them with the
alternative of conscientious objection. I am pleased to say that this
is a path now chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma
mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the
American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover, I
would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial
exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. These are the
times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when
our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its
own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest
that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.</p>
<p>Now there is something seductively tempting about stopping there and
sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade
against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter that struggle, but I
wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing.</p>
<p>The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within
the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality...and if we
ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing "clergy
and laymen concerned" committees for the next generation. They will be
concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about
Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and
South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and
attending rallies without end, unless there is a significant and
profound change in American life and policy.</p>
<p>And so, such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our
calling as sons of the living God.</p>
<p>In 1957, a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed
to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution.
During the past ten years, we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression
which has now justified the presence of U.S. military advisors in
Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments
accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in
Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against
guerrillas in Cambodia and why American napalm and Green Beret forces
have already been active against rebels in Peru.</p>
<p>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 investments. 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...we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society
to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit
motives and property rights, are considered more important than people,
the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are
incapable of being conquered.</p>
<p>A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the
fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the
one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside,
but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that
the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will
not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on
life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a
beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs
restructuring.</p>
<p>A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring
contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will
look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West
investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only
to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of
the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our
alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not
just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach
others and nothing to learn from them is not just.</p>
<p>A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say
of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business
of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with
orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins
of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody
battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged,
cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that
continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than
on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense
against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be
defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join
those who shout war and, through their misguided passions, urge the
United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations.
These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We
must not engage in a negative anticommunism, but rather in a positive
thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against
communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must
with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty,
insecurity, and injustice, which are the fertile soil in which the seed
of communism grows and develops.</p>
<p>These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting
against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the
wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being
born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as
never before. The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light.
We in the West must support these revolutions.</p>
<p>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 antirevolutionaries. This has
driven many to feel that only Marxism has a revolutionary spirit.
Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make
democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated.
Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary
spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal
hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful
commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores,
and thereby speed the day when "every valley shall be exalted, and
every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be
made straight, and the rough places plain."</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern
beyond one's tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an
all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind. This oft
misunderstood, this oft misinterpreted concept, so readily dismissed by
the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now
become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of
love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am not
speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. I am speaking of
that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme
unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the
door which leads to ultimate reality. This
Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is
beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John: "Let us love
one another, for love is God. And every one that loveth is born of God
and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love."
"If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected
in us." Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day.</p>
<p>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. And history is cluttered with the wreckage
of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of
hate. As Arnold Toynbee says: "Love is the ultimate force that makes
for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of
death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the
hope that love is going to have the last word" (unquote).</p>
<p>We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today.
We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding
conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late.
Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us
standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in
the affairs of men does not remain at flood -- it ebbs. We may cry out
desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to
every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues
of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, "Too late."
There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our
vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: "The moving finger
writes, and having writ moves on."</p>
<p>We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent
coannihilation. 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently
stated:</p>
<p>Once to every man and nation comes a moment to decide,</p>
<p>In the strife of Truth and Falsehood, for the good or evil side;</p>
<p>Some great cause, God's new Messiah offering each the bloom or
blight,</p>
<p>And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that light.</p>
<p>Though the cause of evil prosper, yet 'tis truth alone is strong</p>
<p>Though her portions be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong</p>
<p>Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown</p>
<p>Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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