04/04/1967
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 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
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.