[Peace-discuss] AWARE at indoor Lincoln Square market tomorrow, Sat Jan 17th, 8am-1pm - and, Martin Luther King

[Stuart Levy via Peace-discuss]

Hey all,

AWARE will have our peace booth at the Market inside Lincoln Square 
tomorrow, Jan. 17th, from 8am - 1pm.   Please stop by and talk with 
us.   (We still have peace calendars - make us an offer if you'd like one.)

Martin Luther King's birthday was this week, January 15th.    From a 
civil rights leader, he grew to be a powerful opponent of the war in 
Vietnam - opposition that was controversial at the time - and more 
broadly to oppose the triple evils of racism, militarism, and extreme 
materialism, which he saw as linked.

Below is King's speech, "Beyond Vietnam - A Time To Break Silence", 
which he gave in New York City on April 4th, 1967, a year to the day 
before he was assassinated.    This is a good time to read and consider 
this and others of his writings - many remain thoroughly radical today.

(Patsy Howell says it: if King were only a dreamer, they wouldn't have 
shot him.)

===========================================================================

[from http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2564.htm, with 
some corrections and emphasis added -SL]


  Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence
  by Rev. Martin Luther King

By 1967, King had become the country's most prominent opponent of the 
Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which 
he deemed militaristic. In his "Beyond Vietnam" speech delivered at New 
York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 -- a year to the day before he 
was murdered -- King called the United States "the greatest purveyor of 
violence in the world today."

Time magazine called the speech "demagogic slander that sounded like a 
script for Radio Hanoi," and the Washington Post declared that King had 
"diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."

------------------------------------------------------------------------


    Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence
    By Rev. Martin Luther King
    4 April 1967

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

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

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

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

Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own 
silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have 
called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many 
persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of 
their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: Why are you 
speaking about war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? 
Peace and civil rights don't mix, they say. Aren't you hurting the cause 
of your people, they ask? And when I hear them, though I often 
understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly 
saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really 
known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest 
that they do not know the world in which they live.

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

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

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

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


    The Importance of Vietnam

Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I 
have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral 
vision. *There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile 
connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, 
have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment 
in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for 
the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There 
were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in 
Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were 
some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew 
that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in 
rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued 
to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction 
tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the 
poor and to attack it as such.*

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

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

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

    /O, yes,
    I say it plain,
    America never was America to me,
    And yet I swear this oath--
    America will be!
    /

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

As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America 
were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 
1964; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a 
commission -- a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before 
for "the brotherhood of man." This is a calling that takes me beyond 
national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet *have 
to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus 
Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace 
is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am 
speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the 
good news was meant for all men -- for Communist and capitalist, for 
their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and 
conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to 
the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them?* What then 
can I say to the "Vietcong" or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful 
minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share 
with them my life?

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

*This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem 
ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and 
deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined 
goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the 
voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for 
no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.*


    Strange Liberators

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

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

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

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

Before the end of the war we were meeting eighty percent of the French 
war costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they 
began to despair of the reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged 
them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war 
even after they had lost the will. Soon we would be paying almost the 
full costs of this tragic attempt at recolonization.

After the French were defeated it looked as if independence and land 
reform would come again through the Geneva agreements. But instead there 
came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the 
temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we 
supported one of the most vicious modern dictators -- our chosen man, 
Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly routed 
out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords and refused 
even to discuss reunification with the north. The peasants watched as 
all this was presided over by U.S. influence and then by increasing 
numbers of U.S. troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem's 
methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, 
but the long line of military dictatorships seemed to offer no real 
change -- especially in terms of their need for land and peace.

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

They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their 
crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas 
preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, 
with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one 
"Vietcong"-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them 
-- mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the 
children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets 
like animals. They see the children, degraded by our soldiers as they 
beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our 
soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.

What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and 
as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land 
reform? What do they think as we test our latest weapons on them, just 
as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the 
concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent 
Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?

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

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

Perhaps the more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for 
those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National 
Liberation Front -- that strangely anonymous group we call VC or 
Communists? What must they think of us in America when they realize that 
we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem which helped to bring 
them into being as a resistance group in the south? What do they think 
of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? 
How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of "aggression 
from the north" as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How 
can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the 
murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour 
every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand 
their feelings even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must 
see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we 
must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf 
their greatest acts.

How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is 
less than twenty-five percent Communist and yet insist on giving them 
the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are 
aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam and yet we appear 
ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized 
political parallel government will have no part? They ask how we can 
speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled 
by the military junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of 
new government we plan to help form without them -- the only party in 
real touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and they 
deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded. 
Their questions are frighteningly relevant. Is our nation planning to 
build on political myth again and then shore it up with the power of new 
violence?

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

So, too, with Hanoi. In the north, where our bombs now pummel the land, 
and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but 
understandable mistrust. To speak for them is to explain this lack of 
confidence in Western words, and especially their distrust of American 
intentions now. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence 
against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in 
the French commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and 
the willfulness of the colonial armies. It was they who led a second 
struggle against French domination at tremendous costs, and then were 
persuaded to give up the land they controlled between the thirteenth and 
seventeenth parallel as a temporary measure at Geneva. After 1954 they 
watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which would have 
surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam, and they 
realized they had been betrayed again.

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

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

At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these 
last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless on Vietnam and to 
understand the arguments of those who are called enemy, *I am as deeply 
concerned about our troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me 
that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the 
brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other 
and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for 
they must know after a short period there that none of the things we 
claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know 
that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, 
and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the 
wealthy and the secure while we create hell for the poor.*


    This Madness Must Cease

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. *I speak as a child 
of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those 
whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose 
culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are 
paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and 
corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world 
as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to 
the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. 
The initiative to stop it must be ours.*

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

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

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

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

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

  * End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.
  * Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will
    create the atmosphere for negotiation.
  * Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast
    Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our
    interference in Laos.
  * Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has
    substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in
    any meaningful negotiations and in any future Vietnam government.
  * Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in
    accordance with the 1954 Geneva agreement.

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


    Protesting The War

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

*As we counsel young men concerning military service we must clarify for 
them our nation's role in Vietnam and challenge them with the 
alternative of conscientious objection.* I am pleased to say that this 
is the path now being chosen by more than seventy students at my own 
alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the 
American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover I 
would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial 
exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. These are the 
times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our 
lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own 
folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that 
best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

There is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending 
us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against 
the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter the struggle, but I wish to go 
on now to say something even more disturbing. *The war in Vietnam is but 
a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we 
ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy- 
and laity-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 Cambodia 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.* 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 
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 those 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 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 calling of the 
sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we 
say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? 
Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against 
their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will 
there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their 
yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice 
is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose, in this 
crucial moment of human history.

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

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

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

And if we will only make the right choice, we will be able to transform 
this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of peace.

If we will make the right choice we will be able to transform the 
jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.

If we will but make the right choice, we will be able to speed up the 
day, all over America and all over the world, when justice will roll 
down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.


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