乐

经典生活美好享受

找乐	健身	电影	听歌	聊天	讲演
泡吧	旅游	DV	电游	恋爱	台球

乐（FUN）-找乐

您的位置：首页-乐-讲演-本页

46.Martin Luther King: Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence

I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience
leaves me no other choice. I join 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
statements 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." And 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.
And 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 movements 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
the 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 misunderstanding, 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 must play in the successful resolution of
the problem. While they both may have justifiable reasons 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 National
Liberation Front, but rather to my fellowed [sic] Americans, *who, with
me, bear the greatest responsibility in ending a conflict that has exacted
a heavy price on both continents.
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 this 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. And 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. And so we watch them in brutal solidarity
burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly
live on the same block in Chicago. 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 ask --
and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They ask 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 the 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 until 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
1954** [sic]; 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'm 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?
And finally, as I try to explain 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 the
victims of our nation and for those it calls "enemy," for no document from
human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.
And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways
to understand and respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly to the
people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side,
not of the ideologies of the Liberation Front, 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 1954* -- in 1945 *rather* -- 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 their 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 Agreement. 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 rooted 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 United States' influence and then by increasing numbers
of United States 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 dictators 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 the 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 on 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 out 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 noncommunist 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.
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 a 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 the United States of 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 not have a 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 upon 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 could 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 Agreement concerning foreign troops. They
remind us that they did not begin to send troops in large numbers and even
supplies into the South until American forces had moved into the tens of
thousands.
Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the
earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed
that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched
as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has
surely heard 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 hundred, or rather,* 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 in Vietnam and to understand
the arguments of those who are called "enemy," I am as deeply concerned
about our own 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 a hell for the poor.
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 one who loves America, to the
leaders of our 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, and I quote:
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 (unquote).
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. 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 horrible, 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:
Number one: End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.

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

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

Four: 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 any future Vietnam government.

Five: *Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in
accordance with the 1954 Geneva Agreement.
Part of our ongoing...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 must provide
the medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in this country,
if necessary. Meanwhile... 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 and
our lives if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam. We must
be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative
method 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 a path now
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.
Now 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 that 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...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.
And so, 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 has now
justified the presence of U.S. military advisors in Venezuela. This need
to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the
counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why
American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why
American napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active against
rebels in Peru.
It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F.
Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make
peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has
taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by
refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the
immense profits of overseas investments. 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...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,
extreme 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 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
South 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 hand 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 the veins of
peoples 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 engage in a
negative anticommunism, 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.*
These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting
against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds
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 antirevolutionaries. This has driven many to feel
that only Marxism has a revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a
judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on
the revolutions that 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 worldwide 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 mankind. This oft
misunderstood, this oft 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 not speaking of
that force which is just emotional bosh. 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-Muslim-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 every one 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. And 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" (unquote).
We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are
confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of
life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination
is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and
dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not
remain at flood -- it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause
in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the
bleached bones and jumbled residues 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. Omar Khayyam is right:
"The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on."
We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent
coannihilation. 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 a moment to decide,
In the strife of Truth and Falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God's new Messiah offering 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 portions be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

And if we will only make the right choice, we will be able to transform
this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of peace.
If we will make the right choice, we will be able to transform the
jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.
If we will but make the right choice, we will be able to speed up the day,
all over America and all over the world, when justice will roll down like
waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.

　