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.
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