This document is online at: ratical.org/MLK-today
Dr. Martin Luther King's
1967 Anti-War Speech And Today
adapted by E. Martin Schotz
with assistance from David Ratcliffe
20 June 2016
ratical.org
IMAGE: Martin Luther King speaking at
Riverside Church in NYC, 4 April 1967
Almost fifty years ago Martin Luther King gave a major speech against the
Vietnam war and US militarism in general. In that speech he tied together our
militaristic and repressive response to the movements of national liberation
throughout the world that were threatening certain economic interests. He
called for a revolution in our values from an orientation toward wealth and
physical things toward a concern with others and particularly the poor. He
warned that history did not stand still, that if we did not seize the
opportunity, the tides that seemed to be rising against injustice might
recede.
Looking back we can see that he warning was all too true. The lessons of the
movement against of the Vietnam War were not learned by us. We allowed
ourselves to be mesmerized by the manufactured drama of Watergate. We allowed
our revulsion over the Vietnam War to be labeled our "Vietnam Syndrome",
something to be cured by another more successful First War against Iraq.
Now fifty years later we are in darker times. The military industrial
intelligence complex, the national security state, the corporations and their
media are all more entrenched. We find ourselves living inside a monster to
which we have a parasitic relationship, a monster which progressively
threatens the environment upon which life on our planet depends.
Today is Martin Luther King Day. Is this really a day of celebration of Martin
Luther King, Jr.? Or is it a day designed to further consign him to history
and truncate his message? In an effort to explore this, let's go back to his
speech at Riverside Church of 49 years ago on April 4, 1967, a year to the day
before he was assassinated, and, re-working it, take from it what we can for
today. Perhaps this can help us come closer to truly resurrecting Martin
Luther King, Jr in ourselves. In the following 2016 re-work, Dr. King's
original words are set in italics and bold.
________________________________________________________
A time comes when silence is betrayal....
Gandhi taught us that "Truth is God". If this is so, to turn away from truth
is to turn away from God. But there is more that needs to be understood about
truth.
On April 25, 1998 Guatemalan Bishop Juan Jose Gerardi Conedera was
assassinated one day after he stood before an audience in the Metropolitan
Cathedral of Guatemala City and gave a speech in which he presented the
findings of an in-depth probe into thousands and thousands of murdered and
disappeared persons, casualties of a campaign of terror against the people of
Guatemala waged by their own government, a war against the people supported by
the US government.
Here is some of what Bishop Conedera said in his April 24th speech.
The root of humanity's downfall and disgrace comes from the deliberate
opposition to truth ... this reality that has been intentionally deformed
in our country throughout thirty-six years of war against the people.
To open ourselves to the truth and to bring ourselves face to face with
our personal and collective reality is not an option that can be accepted
or rejected. It is an undeniable requirement of all people and all
societies that seek to humanize themselves and to be free....
Truth is the primary word, the serious and mature action that makes it
possible for us to break the cycle of death and violence and open
ourselves to a future of hope and light for all ...
Discovering the truth is painful, but it is without a doubt a healthy and
liberating action.
And the failure to speak the truth is to turn away from God.
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
perplexing 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.
These are dark times indeed, but they are not without shafts of light. In
response to our threatened environment a courageous Canadian woman, Naomi
Klein, has written This Changes Everything: Capitalism versus the Climate. In
the face of our national security state Edward Snowden has broken the code of
silence and David Talbot has written The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the
CIA and the Rise of America's Secret Government. In the contest to determine
the next President there is even a candidate who is speaking openly about
important and rarely heard truths about our system. He is openly espousing
"socialism" and he has dared to mention the truth regarding our long history
of engaging in what is politely referred to as "regime change" as in Guatemala
and Iran for instance. Truth is a shaft of light in the darkness of the
monster.
My hope is that in the process of truth telling a significant number of us
will 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,
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.
If silence is betrayal, has the time come for us to speak the truth about our
so-called "War on Terror"?
I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved
nation. This speech is not addressed to members of ISIS, or members of Al
Quada, or those who would do violence to America. Nor is it an attempt to
overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective
solution to the tragic wars in the Middle East and in Asia. Neither is it an
attempt to suggest that the positions of the members of ISIS, or members of Al
Quada, or those who would do violence to America are those of virtue, nor to
overlook the role they must play in the successful resolution of the problem.
While they believe they have justifiable reasons to hate and want to bring
harm to 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...to speak...to my fellow Americans.
Since I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not surprising that I have
seven major reasons for bringing the "War on Terror" into the field of my
moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile
connection between the "War on Terror" 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. Many felt that with the end of the Cold War, it might be
possible for there to be a new era of peace. Then came the "War on Terror",
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 the "War on Terror" 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 a 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 daughters and their brothers and
sisters and their husbands and wives 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...thousand[s] of miles away to supposedly guarantee a democracy which
seemed increasingly remote here in the United States. 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 America ... 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 the `War on Terror?'" 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 and girls, for
the sake of this government, for the sake of the 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 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:
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 the "War on
Terror". 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 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 1954[1].
And I cannot forget that the Nobel Peace Prize was also a commission, a
commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for the brotherhood
and sisterhood of humankind. 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 this war. Could it be that they do not
know that the Good News was meant for all men and women,...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 people of
Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, 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 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, daughtership and
sisterhood. Because I believe that God is deeply concerned especially
for...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 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 and sisters.
And as I ponder the madness of the "War on Terror" and search within myself
for ways to understand and respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly to
the people of the Middle East. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side,
not of the ideologies of our allies or our enemies, but simply of the people
who have been living under the curse of this war for more than a decade. 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....
The essence and the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when
it helps us to see the other's point of view, and to...learn and grow and
profit from the wisdom of the other.
We must muster a willingness to see how things appear from the other side. And
so I must undertake a very painful task of looking more deeply into the
history of this "War on Terror" and of calling my fellow citizens to examine
the evidence of how it was launched and how it must appear to people whose
vision is not clouded by a loyalty to the government of the United States. I
am speaking about the events of September 11, 2001. The act which was used as
the basis for launching this so-called "War on Terror".
But I also want to quote to you a poem by Bertolt Brecht: In Praise of
Learning. It is a poem of the utmost importance for us in this time of
darkness in this nation.
Learn the simplest things
for you whose time has come, it is never too late.
You must take the lead.
Learn your ABC's.
It is not enough, but learn them.
Don't be discouraged, begin!
You must know everything.
You must take the lead.
Study you in exile.
Study you in prison
Study you in the kitchen
Study you who are old.
You must take the lead.
Seek out a school, you who are homeless.
Sharpen your wits, you who shiver.
Hungry one, reach for a book.
It is a weapon.
You must take the lead.
Don't be afraid asking.
Don't be won over,
What you don't know yourself,
You don't know.
Add up the reckoning.
It's you who must pay it.
Put your finger on each item.
Ask, "How did that get here."
You must take the lead.
We, the people of the United States have a responsibility to God, to put our
fingers on the "War on Terror" and to fearlessly ask, "How did it get here?"
Anyone who is willing to do this must confront a most disturbing reality. What
we have been told by our government and the corporate mass media about the
events of September 11, 2001 cannot be true. This fact has been established by
numerous individuals who have had the courage to examine the evidence, to
speak what they have found, and not be mesmerized by those in power who
attempt to convince us that the truth is uncertain.
I cannot in this limited time discuss the details, but I can direct you to a
variety of resources which any person who wishes to be faithful to God must
take up. Amongst these resources are the British film Incontrovertible, Graeme
MacQueen's The 2001 Anthrax Deception: The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy, and
the lucid analyses of theologian and author David Ray Griffin. Of Griffin's 11
books on the evidence of the event. I recommend any of the following three:
The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the Cover-up and the Expose, The
Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7: Why the Final Official Report
about 9/11 is Unscientific, and Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11: A
Call to Reflection and Action[A][B]. These sources, to name but a few, make
clear there is nothing mysterious about 9/11.
In doing our homework, it will be necessary to return to the period before
September 11, 2001, to a time before the George W. Bush Administration, to the
Project for a New American Century.
The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) [HTML, PDF] was a
neoconservative think tank based in Washington, D.C. that focused on United
States foreign policy. It was established as a non-profit educational
organization in 1997, and founded by William Kristol and Robert Kagan. The
PNAC's stated goal was "to promote American global leadership". The
organization stated that "American leadership is good both for America and for
the world," and sought to build support for "a Reaganite policy of military
strength and moral clarity".
The following excerpt is quoted verbatim (with British spellings of certain
words).
"A New Pearl Harbor" by John Pilger. New Statesman, 16 Dec 2002
Two years ago a project set up by the men who now surround George W Bush
said what America needed was "a new Pearl Harbor." Its published aims
have, alarmingly, come true.
The threat posed by US terrorism to the security of nations and
individuals was outlined in prophetic detail in a document written more
than two years ago and disclosed only recently. What was needed for
America to dominate much of humanity and the world's resources, it said,
was "some catastrophic and catalysing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor".
The attacks of 11 September 2001 provided the "new Pearl Harbor",
described as "the opportunity of ages". The extremists who have since
exploited 11 September come from the era of Ronald Reagan, when far-right
groups and "think-tanks" were established to avenge the American "defeat"
in Vietnam. In the 1990s, there was an added agenda: to justify the denial
of a "peace dividend" following the cold war. The Project for the New
American Century was formed, along with the American Enterprise Institute,
the Hudson Institute and others that have since merged the ambitions of
the Reagan administration with those of the current Bush regime.
One of George W Bush's "thinkers" is Richard Perle. I interviewed Perle
when he was advising Reagan; and when he spoke about "total war", I
mistakenly dismissed him as mad. He recently used the term again in
describing America's "war on terror". "No stages," he said. "This is total
war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out
there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we
will do Iraq...this is entirely the wrong way to go about it. If we just
let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we
don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total
war...our children will sing great songs about us years from now."
Perle is one of the founders of the Project for the New American Century,
the PNAC. Other founders include Dick Cheney, now vice-president, Donald
Rumsfeld, defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, deputy defence secretary, I
Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, William J Bennett, Reagan's
education secretary, and Zalmay Khalilzad, Bush's ambassador to
Afghanistan. These are the modern chartists of American terrorism.
The PNAC's seminal report, Rebuilding America's Defences: strategy, forces
and resources for a new century, was a blueprint of American aims in all
but name. Two years ago it recommended an increase in arms-spending by
$48bn so that Washington could "fight and win multiple, simultaneous major
theatre wars". This has happened. It said the United States should develop
"bunker-buster" nuclear weapons and make "star wars" a national priority.
This is happening. It said that, in the event of Bush taking power, Iraq
should be a target. And so it is....
Time and again, 11 September is described as an "opportunity". In last
April's New Yorker, the investigative reporter Nicholas Lemann wrote that
Bush's most senior adviser, Condoleezza Rice, told him she had called
together senior members of the National Security Council and asked them
"to think about `how do you capitalise on these opportunities'", which she
compared with those of "1945 to 1947": the start of the cold war....
In the Los Angeles Times, the military analyst William Arkin describes a
secret army set up by Donald Rumsfeld, similar to those run by Richard
Nixon and Henry Kissinger and which Congress outlawed. This
"super-intelligence support activity" will bring together the "CIA and
military covert action, information warfare, and deception". According to
a classified document prepared for Rumsfeld, the new organisation, known
by its Orwellian moniker as the Proactive Pre-emptive Operations Group, or
P2OG, will provoke terrorist attacks which would then require
"counter-attack" by the United States on countries "harbouring the
terrorists".
In other words, innocent people will be killed by the United States. This
is reminiscent of Operation Northwoods, the plan put to President Kennedy
by his military chiefs for a phoney terrorist campaign - complete with
bombings, hijackings, plane crashes and dead Americans - as justification
for an invasion of Cuba. Kennedy rejected it. He was assassinated a few
months later. Now Rumsfeld has resurrected Northwoods, but with resources
undreamt of in 1963 and with no global rival to invite caution.
You have to keep reminding yourself this is not fantasy: that truly
dangerous men, such as Perle and Rumsfeld and Cheney, have power. The
thread running through their ruminations is the importance of the media:
"the prioritised task of bringing on board journalists of repute to accept
our position".
"Our position" is code for lying.... [T]he more insidious lies, justifying
an unprovoked attack on Iraq and linking it to would-be terrorists who are
said to lurk in every Tube station, are routinely channelled as news. They
are not news; they are black propaganda.
This corruption makes journalists and broadcasters mere ventriloquists'
dummies. An attack on a nation of 22 million suffering people is discussed
by liberal commentators as if it were a subject at an academic seminar, at
which pieces can be pushed around a map, as the old imperialists used to
do....
Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God
and brother and sister to the suffering poor of our wars. 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 dealt death and corruption ... 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.
The following words were written at the time of the Vietnam war by a Buddhist
priest and I quote:
Each day the war goes on the hatred increases 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.
As if this were not bad enough, we must also consider the looming threat of
climate chaos, a threat which urgently demands our spiritual and physical
resources if humankind is to survive.
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 our "War on Terror." If we do not stop
our "War on Terror" 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 the entire "War on Terror"
is a criminal conspiracy in large part orchestrated by the Government of the
United States. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply
from our present ways. In order to atone for our sins...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:
Number one: End all bombing.
Number two: Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will
create the atmosphere for negotiation.
Three: Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in the Middle East
or elsewhere by curtailing any further military buildup.
Four: Realistically accept the fact that we cannot be arbiters in the
negotiations which must take place between the warring parties in Syria, Iraq,
and Afghanistan.
Five: Set a date that we will remove all our troops.
Part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant
asylum to any person who fears for his/her life under a new regime ... 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, 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 ... We must be prepared to match actions with
words by seeking out every creative method of protest possible.
As we counsel young men concerning military service, we must clarify for them
our nation's role ... We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on
the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every person of humane
convictions must decide on the protest that best suits their convictions, but
we must all protest.
Now while we most certainly need a popular crusade against the "War on
Terror", this war is a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American
spirit, ... So such thoughts take us beyond the "War on Terror", but not
beyond our calling as sons and daughters 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.... we have seen
emerge a pattern of suppression which has now justified the presence of U.S.
military advisors in all corners of the world. This need to maintain social
stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of
American forces ... It tells why American Drones ... are being used ...
It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy
come back to haunt us. Sixty-four 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 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.
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.
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.
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 and women 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....
Whatever it takes we must reorder 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 and sisterhood.
This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against terror.
War is not the answer. Terrorism will never be defeated by the use of atomic
bombs or nuclear weapons.
War is itself the ultimate form of terrorism. And our embrace of nuclear
weapons is the worst aspect of this. In this regard we must demand a halt to
the effort to modernize nuclear weapons, so they can be more "easily and
efficiently used". We must press for immediate worldwide negotiations through
the UN to ban the possession of all nuclear weapons. In this regard the US
should take the initiative in stating its goal to give up all its nuclear
weapons.
The United States should sign all international agreements prohibiting the
possession and use against biological and chemical warfare agents and should
halt research into these agents.
If we are truly against violence [w]e must with positive action seek to remove
those conditions of poverty, insecurity, and injustice, which are the fertile
soil in which the seed of violence grows and develops.
These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men and women are revolting
against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a
frail world, new systems of justice and equality must be born.
It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of
terrorism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western
nations...have now become the arch antirevolutionaries.... 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."
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 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 our species and the rest of nature as well. 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 or she that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love.... If we love
one another, God dwelleth in us and God's 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." Unquote.
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 human affairs 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."
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...and justice throughout the...world ... 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 and
daughters of God, and our brothers and sisters 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 women, 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 a moment to decide,
In the strife of Truth and Falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God's new Messiah offering 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 portions 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.
I return to the words of Bishop Conedera and repeat them.
The root of humanity's downfall and disgrace comes from the deliberate
opposition to truth ... this reality that has been intentionally deformed
in our country throughout... years of war against the people.
To open ourselves to the truth and to bring ourselves face to face with
our personal and collective reality is not an option that can be accepted
or rejected. It is an undeniable requirement of all people and all
societies that seek to humanize themselves and to be free....
Truth is the primary word, the serious and mature action that makes it
possible for us to break the cycle of death and violence and open
ourselves to a future of hope and light for all ...
Discovering the truth is painful, but it is without a doubt a healthy and
liberating action.
1. King says "1954," but most likely means 1964, the year he received the
Nobel Peace Prize.
http://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/MLK-1967-And-Today.html (hypertext)
http://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/MLK-1967-And-Today.txt (text only)
http://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/MLK-1967-And-Today.pdf (print ready)