Honoring Dr. King

Martin Luther King, Jr., Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence, delivered 4 April 1967 at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City:

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.

Not much has changed in the intervening years, has it? Today it's the Iraq occupation that is the "demonic destructive suction tube." Today it's a debacle in Iraq which will end up costing at least a trillion dollars when all is said and done. A trillion dollars charged to future generations, adding to an already monstrous debt created by the right-wing plot to ensure that our wealthiest citizens and biggest corporations pay next to nothing in taxes for the common good.

Think what a trillion dollars could do to help build a just society here in America, with excellent schools and health care and services for the elderly and housing and communities and opportunities for all. Instead Bush will be asking for more than $10 billion to pay for a jobs program -- in Iraq, not here in the U.S. Instead the government is asking for another $100 billion to impose our oil-hungry will on a nation we are dismantling and attempting to rebuild so it serves our needs, not those who call it home.

The Reverend King would have been 78 this year. I imagine he is rolling painfully in his grave, as the saying goes. Our nation's leadership vacuum, its debt, its warmongering, injustice and imperialism have far surpassed what he criticized in the 60s. We seem to have lost all shame about tolerating sweatshops, tolerating torture, tolerating profound dishonesty in the service of greed and hubris around the globe, tolerating broken down schools, ruined neighborhoods, decimated housing stocks and wars of choice. It is we who allow them to direct outrageously more to the haves by taking everything of value from the have nots.

How can we best honor Reverend King this year? One way is to speak out, to refuse to maintain a frightened, cowed or cynical silence in the face of injustice and violence. In King's words:

... 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.

... 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.

... 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.

Substitute Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Venezuela, Cuba, Sudan, secret prisons in Eastern Europe and even "detainment camps" within our own borders. Silence = collaboration. We need to get up and stand up. We need to speak up and demand that our elected representatives do the same. Ignoring the horrors of today's Bush policies will permit more escalation, more calculated inhumanity, more horrific violence in our names in more and more places, here and abroad. We must break the silence at every level and do it now. We must challenge the current sickly orientation of the nation. We must heed the warnings of Dr. King when he said:

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 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.

... 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.

Links to King resources.

PS: I find it admirable that presidential candidate John Edwards is evoking King's 'Beyond Vietnam' speech today, at his own speech at the Riverside Church.