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| NAME |
peacemaking |
DATE |
2003-01-19 |
HIT |
343 |
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마틴 루터 킹(Martin Luther King) 의 반전연설 |
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr
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 re-conquest 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 re-colonize 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 re-colonization.
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. 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 judgment 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 mountain and hill shall be made low, and the
crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain."
A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis
that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every
nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order
to preserve the best in their individual societies.
This call for a 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 desperately 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.
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* This speech and others by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. are posted at Peace Race: The Better Alternative to an Arms Race.
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