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Date Posted: 23:51:34 04/04/02 Thu
Author: Drummond
Subject: Martin Luther King, 35 years ago today

Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence

by Rev. Martin Luther King

Speech delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on
April 4, 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Laity
Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City

I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight
because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join
with you in this meeting because I am in deepest
agreement with the aims and work of the organization
which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen
Concerned about Vietnam. The recent statement of your
executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart
and I found myself in full accord when I read its
opening lines: "A time comes when silence is betrayal."
That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.

The truth of these words is beyond doubt but the
mission to which they call us is a most difficult one.
Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do
not easily assume the task of opposing their
government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor
does the human spirit move without great difficulty
against all the apathy of conformist thought within
one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover
when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often
do in the case of this dreadful conflict we are always
on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we
must move on.

Some of us who have already begun to break the silence
of the night have found that the calling to speak is
often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must
speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our
limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice
as well, for surely this is the first time in our
nation's history that a significant number of its
religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the
prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of
a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience
and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is
rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movement
well and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive
to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way
beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.

Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the
betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the
burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical
departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many
persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path.
At the heart of their concerns this query has often
loomed large and loud: Why are you speaking about war,
Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent?
Peace and civil rights don't mix, they say. Aren't you
hurting the cause of your people, they ask.

And when I hear them, though I often understand the
source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly
saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers
have not really known me, my commitment or my calling.
Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know
the world in which they live.

In the light of such tragic misunderstandings, I deem
it of signal importance to try to state clearly, and I
trust concisely, why I believe that the path from
Dexter Avenue Baptist Church -- the church in
Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate --
leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.

I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate
plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed
to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not
addressed to China or to Russia.

Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the
total situation and the need for a collective solution
to the tragedy of Vietnam.

Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the
National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to
overlook the role they can play in a successful
resolution of the problem. While they both may have
justifiable reason to be suspicious of the good faith
of the United States, life and history give eloquent
testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved
without trustful give and take on both sides.

Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and
the NLF, but rather to my fellow Americans, who, with
me, bear the greatest responsibility in ending a
conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both
continents.

The Importance of Vietnam Since I am a preacher by
trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven
major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my
moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and
almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and
the struggle I, and others, have been waging in
America.

A few years ago there was a shining moment in that
struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of
hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through
the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new
beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I
watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it
were some idle political plaything of a society gone
mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest
the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of
its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued
to draw men and skills and money like some demonic
destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly
compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to
attack it as such.

Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took
place when it became clear to me that the war was doing
far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at
home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and
their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily
high proportions relative to the rest of the
population. We were taking the black young men who had
been crippled by our society and sending them eight
thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast
Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and
East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the
cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV
screens as they kill and die together for a nation that
has been unable to seat them together in the same
schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning
the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they
would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could
not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of
the poor.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of
awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the
ghettoes of the North over the last three years --
especially the last three summers. As I have walked
among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I
have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would
not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my
deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that
social change comes most meaningfully through
nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so --
what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't
using massive doses of violence to solve its problems,
to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions
hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my
voice against the violence of the oppressed in the
ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the
greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my
own government. For the sake of those boys, for the
sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of
thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be
silent.

For those who ask the question, "Aren't you a civil
rights leader?" and thereby mean to exclude me from the
movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957
when a group of us formed the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save
the soul of America." We were convinced that we could
not limit our vision to certain rights for black
people, but instead affirmed the conviction that
America would never be free or saved from itself unless
the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely
from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were
agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of
Harlem, who had written earlier:

Oh, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to
me, And yet I swear this oath: America will be!

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who
has any concern for the integrity and life of America
today can ignore the present war. If America's soul
becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read
Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys
the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that
those of us who are yet determined that America will be
are led down the path of protest and dissent, working
for the health of our land.

As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and
health of America were not enough, another burden of
responsibility was placed upon me in 1964; and I cannot
forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a
commission -- a commission to work harder than I had
ever worked before for "the brotherhood of man." This
is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances,
but even if it were not present I would yet have to
live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry
of Jesus Christ.

To me the relationship of this ministry to the making
of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those
who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it
be that they do not know that the good news was meant
for all men -- for Communist and capitalist, for their
children and ours, for black and for white, for
revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten
that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved
his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then
can I say to the "Vietcong" or to Castro or to Mao as a
faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with
death or must I not share with them my life?

Finally, as I try to delineate for you and for myself
the road that leads from Montgomery to this place I
would have offered all that was most valid if I simply
said that I must be true to my conviction that I share
with all men the calling to be a son of the living God.
Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this
vocation of sonship and brotherhood, and because I
believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially
for his suffering and helpless and outcast children, I
come tonight to speak for them.

This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of
all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and
loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism
and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and
positions.

We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless,
for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy,
for no document from human hands can make these humans
any less our brothers.

Strange Liberators And as I ponder the madness of
Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand
and respond to compassion my mind goes constantly to
the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the
soldiers of each side, not of the junta in Saigon, but
simply of the people who have been living under the
curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I
think of them too because it is clear to me that there
will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt
is made to know them and hear their broken cries.

They must see Americans as strange liberators. The
Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in
1945 after a combined French and Japanese occupation,
and before the Communist revolution in China. They were
led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the
American Declaration of Independence in their own
document of freedom, we refused to recognize them.
Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest
of her former colony.

Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people
were not "ready" for independence, and we again fell
victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has
poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With
that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary
government seeking self-determination, and a government
that had been established not by China (for whom the
Vietnamese have no great love) but by clearly
indigenous forces that included some Communists. For
the peasants this new government meant real land
reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.

For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of
Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years we
vigorously supported the French in their abortive
effort to recolonize Vietnam.

Before the end of the war we were meeting eighty
percent of the French war costs. Even before the French
were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair
of the reckless action, but we did not.

We encouraged them with our huge financial and military
supplies to continue the war even after they had lost
the will. Soon we would be paying almost the full costs
of this tragic attempt at recolonization.

After the French were defeated it looked as if
independence and land reform would come again through
the Geneva agreements. But instead there came the
United States, determined that Ho should not unify the
temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched
again as we supported one of the most vicious modern
dictators -- our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants
watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly routed out all
opposition, supported their extortionist landlords and
refused even to discuss reunification with the north.

The peasants watched as all this was presided over by
U.S. influence and then by increasing numbers of U.S.
troops who came to help quell the insurgency that
Diem's methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown
they may have been happy, but the long line of military
dictatorships seemed to offer no real change --
especially in terms of their need for land and peace.

The only change came from America as we increased our
troop commitments in support of governments which were
singularly corrupt, inept and without popular support.
All the while the people read our leaflets and received
regular promises of peace and democracy -- and land
reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider
us -- not their fellow Vietnamese --the real enemy.
They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off
the land of their fathers into concentration camps
where minimal social needs are rarely met.

They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs.
So they go -- primarily women and children and the
aged.

They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a
million acres of their crops. They must weep as the
bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to
destroy the precious trees. They wander into the
hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from
American firepower for one "Vietcong"-inflicted injury.

So far we may have killed a million of them -- mostly
children.

They wander into the towns and see thousands of the
children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs
on the streets like animals. They see the children,
degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see
the children selling their sisters to our soldiers,
soliciting for their mothers.

What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with
the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into
our many words concerning land reform?

What do they think as we test our latest weapons on
them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and
new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe?

Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim
to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?

We have destroyed their two most cherished
institutions: the family and the village. We have
destroyed their land and their crops. We have
cooperated in the crushing of the nation's only non-
Communist revolutionary political force -- the unified
Buddhist church. We have supported the enemies of the
peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and
children and killed their men. What liberators?

Now there is little left to build on -- save
bitterness. Soon the only solid physical foundations
remaining will be found at our military bases and in
the concrete of the concentration camps we call
fortified hamlets. The peasants may well wonder if we
plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these?
Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak
for them and raise the questions they cannot raise.
These too are our brothers.

Perhaps the more difficult but no less necessary task
is to speak for those who have been designated as our
enemies. What of the National Liberation Front -- that
strangely anonymous group we call VC or Communists?
What must they think of us in America when they realize
that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem
which helped to bring them into being as a resistance
group in the south?

What do they think of our condoning the violence which
led to their own taking up of arms? How can they
believe in our integrity when now we speak of
"aggression from the north" as if there were nothing
more essential to the war? How can they trust us when
now we charge them with violence after the murderous
reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we
pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely
we must understand their feelings even if we do not
condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men
we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we
must see that our own computerized plans of destruction
simply dwarf their greatest acts.

How do they judge us when our officials know that their
membership is less than twenty-five percent Communist
and yet insist on giving them the blanket name? What
must they be thinking when they know that we are aware
of their control of major sections of Vietnam and yet
we appear ready to allow national elections in which
this highly organized political parallel government
will have no part?

They ask how we can speak of free elections when the
Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military
junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of
new government we plan to help form without them -- the
only party in real touch with the peasants.

They question our political goals and they deny the
reality of a peace settlement from which they will be
excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant.
Is our nation planning to build on political myth again
and then shore it up with the power of new violence?

Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and
nonviolence when it helps us to see the enemy's point
of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment
of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the
basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are
mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the
wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.

So, too, with Hanoi. In the north, where our bombs now
pummel the land, and our mines endanger the waterways,
we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. To
speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in
Western words, and especially their distrust of
American intentions now. In Hanoi are the men who led
the nation to independence against the Japanese and the
French, the men who sought membership in the French
commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris
and the willfulness of the colonial armies.

It was they who led a second struggle against French
domination at tremendous costs, and then were persuaded
to give up the land they controlled between the
thirteenth and seventeenth parallel as a temporary
measure at Geneva. After 1954 they watched us conspire
with Diem to prevent elections which would have surely
brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam, and
they realized they had been betrayed again.

When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these
things must be remembered. Also it must be clear that
the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence of
American troops in support of the Diem regime to have
been the initial military breach of the Geneva
agreements concerning foreign troops, and they remind
us that they did not begin to send in any large number
of supplies or men until American forces had moved into
the tens of thousands.

Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the
truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for
peace, how the president claimed that none existed when
they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as
America has spoken of peace and built up its forces,
and now he has surely heard of the increasing
international rumors of American plans for an invasion
of the north. He knows the bombing and shelling and
mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-
invasion strategy. Perhaps only his sense of humor and
of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful
nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops
thousands of bombs on a poor weak nation more than
eight thousand miles away from its shores.

At this point I should make it clear that while I have
tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the
voiceless on Vietnam and to understand the arguments of
those who are called enemy, I am as deeply concerned
about our troops there as anything else.

For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to
in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that
goes on in any war where armies face each other and
seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process
of death, for they must know after a short period there
that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are
really involved.

Before long they must know that their government has
sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the
more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the
side of the wealthy and the secure while we create hell
for the poor.

This Madness Must Cease Somehow this madness must
cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and
brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for
those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are
being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted.

I speak for the poor of America who are paying the
double price of smashed hopes at home and death and
corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the
world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we
have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my
own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours.
The initiative to stop it must be ours.

This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of
Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words:

"Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the
heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of
humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even
their friends into becoming their enemies. It is
curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully
on the possibilities of military victory, do not
realize that in the process they are incurring deep
psychological and political defeat. The image of
America will never again be the image of revolution,
freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and
militarism."

If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and
in the mind of the world that we have no honorable
intentions in Vietnam. It will become clear that our
minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American
colony and men will not refrain from thinking that our
maximum hope is to goad China into a war so that we may
bomb her nuclear installations. If we do not stop our
war against the people of Vietnam immediately the world
will be left with no other alternative than to see this
as some horribly clumsy and deadly game we have decided
to play.

The world now demands a maturity of America that we may
not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that
we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure
in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life
of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which
we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways.

In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam,
we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to
this tragic war. I would like to suggest five concrete
things that our government should do immediately to
begin the long and difficult process of extricating
ourselves from this nightmarish conflict:

1. End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.

2. Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that
such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation.

3. Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds
in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military buildup in
Thailand and our interference in Laos.

4. 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.

5. Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops
from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva
agreement.

Part of our ongoing commitment might well express
itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese
who fears for his life under a new regime which
included the Liberation Front. Then we must make what
reparations we can for the damage we have done. We most
provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it
available in this country if necessary.

Protesting The War Meanwhile we in the churches and
synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our
government to disengage itself from a disgraceful
commitment. We must continue to raise our voices if our
nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam. We
must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking
out every creative means of protest possible.

As we counsel young men concerning military service we
must clarify for them our nation's role in Vietnam and
challenge them with the alternative of conscientious
objection. I am pleased to say that this is the path
now being chosen by more than seventy students at my
own alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it
to all who find the American course in Vietnam a
dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover I would encourage
all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial
exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors.
These are the times for real choices and not false
ones.

We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on
the line if our nation is to survive its own folly.
Every man of humane convictions must decide on the
protest that best suits his convictions, but we must
all protest.

There is something seductively tempting about stopping
there and sending us all off on what in some circles
has become a popular crusade against the war in
Vietnam. I say we must enter the struggle, but I wish
to go on now to say something even more disturbing. The
war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady
within the American spirit, and if we ignore this
sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing
clergy- and laymen-concerned committees for the next
generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and
Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and
Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and
South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen
other names and attending rallies without end unless
there is a significant and profound change in American
life and policy. Such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam,
but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.

In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said
that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong
side of a world revolution.

During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern
of suppression which now has justified the presence of
U.S. military "advisors" in Venezuela. This need to
maintain social stability for our investments accounts
for the counter-revolutionary action of American forces
in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are
being used against guerrillas in Colombia and why
American napalm and green beret forces have already
been active against rebels in Peru.

It is with such activity in mind that the words of the
late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years
ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution
impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the
role our nation has taken -- the role of those who make
peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up
the privileges and the pleasures that come from the
immense profits of overseas investment.

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side
of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a
radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the
shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-
oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit
motives and property rights are considered more
important than people, the giant triplets of racism,
materialism, and militarism are incapable of being
conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to
question the fairness and justice of many of our past
and present policies. n the one hand we are called to
play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that
will be only an initial act. One day we must come to
see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so
that men and women will not be constantly beaten and
robbed as they make their journey on life's highway.
True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a
beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial.

It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars
needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will
soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty
and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look
across the seas and see individual capitalists of the
West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and
South America, only to take the profits out with no
concern for the social betterment of the countries, and
say: "This is not just."

It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of
Latin America and say: "This is not just." The Western
arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach
others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A
true revolution of values will lay hands on the world
order and say of war: "This way of settling differences
is not just."

This business of burning human beings with napalm, of
filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of
injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people
normally humane, of sending men home from dark and
bloody battlefields physically handicapped and
psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with
wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year
after year to spend more money on military defense than
on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual
death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the
world, can well lead the way in this revolution of
values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish,
to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that
the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the
pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from
molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands
until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

This kind of positive revolution of values is our best
defense against communism. War is not the answer.
Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic
bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who
shout war and through their misguided passions urge the
United States to relinquish its participation in the
United Nations. These are days which demand wise
restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not call
everyone a Communist or an appeaser who advocates the
seating of Red China in the United Nations and who
recognizes that hate and hysteria are not the final
answers to the problem of these turbulent days. We must
not engage in a negative anti-communism, but rather in
a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our
greatest defense against communism is to take offensive
action in behalf of justice. We must with positive
action seek to remove thosse conditions of poverty,
insecurity and injustice which are the fertile soil in
which the seed of communism grows and develops.

The People Are Important

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men
are revolting against old systems of exploitation and
oppression and out of the wombs of a frail world new
systems of justice and equality are being born. The
shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up
as never before. "The people who sat in darkness have
seen a great light." We in the West must support these
revolutions. It is a sad fact that, because of comfort,
complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our
proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations
that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of
the modern world have now become the arch anti-
revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only
Marxism has the revolutionary spirit. Therefore,
communism is a judgement against our failure to make
democracy real and follow through on the revolutions we
initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to
recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a
sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to
poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful
commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and
unjust mores and thereby speed the day when "every
valley shall be exalted, and every moutain and hill
shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made
straight and the rough places plain."

A genuine revolution of values means in the final
analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical
rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an
overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to
preserve the best in their individual societies.

This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts
neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class and
nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and
unconditional love for all men. This oft misunderstood
and misinterpreted concept -- so readily dismissed by
the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly
force -- has now become an absolute necessity for the
survival of man.

When I speak of love I am not speaking of some
sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that
force which all of the great religions have seen as the
supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the
key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate
reality.

This Hindu-Moslem-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief
about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the
first epistle of Saint John: "Let us love one another;
for love is God and everyone that loveth is born of God
and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God;
for God is love. If we love one another God dwelleth in
us, and his love is perfected in us."

Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of
the day. We can no longer afford to worship the god of
hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans
of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides
of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of
nations and individuals that pursued this self-
defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says : "Love
is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice
of life and good against the damning choice of death
and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory
must be the hope that love is going to have the last
word."

We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today.
We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In
this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is
such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is
still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing
bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The
"tide in the affairs of men" does not remain at the
flood; it ebbs.

We may cry out deperately for time to pause in her
passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on.
Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous
civilizations are written the pathetic words: "Too
late." There is an invisible book of life that
faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. "The
moving finger writes, and having writ moves on..." We
still have a choice today; nonviolent coexistence or
violent co-annihilation.

We must move past indecision to action. We must find
new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice
throughout the developing world -- a world that borders
on our doors. If we do not act we shall surely be
dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of
time reserved for those who possess power without
compassion, might without morality, and strength
without sight.

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to
the long and bitter -- but beautiful -- struggle for a
new world. This is the callling of the sons of God, and
our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we
say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the
struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the
forces of American life militate against their arrival
as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will
there be another message, of longing, of hope, of
solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their
cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and
though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in
this crucial moment of human history.

As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell,
eloquently stated:

Once to every man and nation Comes the moment to
decide, In the strife of truth and falsehood, For the
good or evil side; Some great cause, God's new
Messiah, Off'ring each the bloom or blight, And the
choice goes by forever Twixt that darkness and that
light.

Though the cause of evil prosper, Yet 'tis truth alone
is strong; Though her portion be the scaffold, And
upon the throne be wrong: Yet that scaffold sways the
future, And behind the dim unknown, Standeth God
within the shadow Keeping watch above his own.

*******************************************************
"Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture
the revolutionary spirit and go into a sometimes
hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty,
racism, and militarism." -Martin Luther King, Jr.
*******************************************************

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