\u201cAnd 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Take a day, pore over a few of his words. I\u2019m talking about Martin Luther King, of course. His \u201cday\u201d is over, but his message still pulsates. We must speak!<\/p>\n
The world is bleeding with the wounds of war and poverty and racism, just as it was 57 years ago, when he spoke \u2014 infamously, you might say \u2014 at Riverside Church in New York City. He defied LBJ and stared directly into the muzzle of the Vietnam war, declaring it to be moral savagery, declaring the United States to be \u201cthe greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.\u201d<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve given King a national holiday, made him a national hero \u2014 but that\u2019s not the same thing as listening to him. It may be the opposite. Deifying him, turning him into a statue, revering his image, could amount to simply shutting him up.<\/p>\n
So I devoted a few hours of his national holiday (actually, the day after) to rereading \u201cBeyond Vietnam,\u201d the speech he gave on April 4, 1967, a year to the day before his assassination. His words aren\u2019t merely critical of the cruelly pointless colonial war, or of the irony of the American public \u201cwatching 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
His words stir together love and hell, despair and hope. His words are deeply prescient:<\/p>\n
\u201cThe war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality . . .\u201d Oh my God! Our wars will go on and on and on, unless we change as a country: fundamentally, spiritually.<\/p>\n
No wonder J. Edgar Hoover (and so many others behind the scene) saw him as a danger to the nation who needed to be shut up, if not eliminated. He had already helped defeat segregation and had begun undoing systemic racism. Now he was taking on military-industrialism and American hegemony:<\/p>\n
\u201cA 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, \u2018This is not just.\u2019 It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, \u2018This is not just.\u2019 The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.\u201d<\/p>\n
What scared the nation\u2019s leaders weren\u2019t simply MLK\u2019s words but the fact that he wielded remarkable power \u2014 a kind of power incomprehensible in political and military circles, a power that acknowledged humility and human oneness. What the hell is he talking about?<\/p>\n
\u201cPerhaps a new spirit is rising among us.\u201d<\/p>\n
And King was one of the carriers of that spirit \u2014 helping to implant it within the social core:<\/p>\n
\u201cI 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, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.\u201d<\/p>\n
It’s one thing to blather about America\u2019s star-studded \u201cofficial\u201d values \u2014 life, liberty, blah blah blah \u2014 but it\u2019s something else entirely to speak about transcending, indeed, \u201cconquering\u201d the (secretly) real values of the ruling class.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
A world that has truly transcended war? A world that embraces \u201cunconditional love for all mankind\u201d?<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I speak of love,\u201d he goes on,<\/p>\n
\u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
And my imagination \u2014 my sense of possibility \u2014 reopens. This is what MLK still brings to humanity: a vision of the future that is profoundly different from the present moment, but also present, desperately present, in this moment. \u201cTomorrow is today.\u201d<\/p>\n
His words unite every religion on the planet. They tear the deepest values we espouse out of the holy books and bring them aboard the bus, across the bridge, into the halls of Congress and into every war room on the planet.<\/p>\n
Their spirit still rises.<\/p>\n
The post We\u2019re Still Moving \u2018Beyond Vietnam\u2019<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cAnd 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.\u201d Take a day, pore over a few of his words. I\u2019m talking about Martin Luther King, of course. His \u201cday\u201d is over, but More<\/a><\/p>\n The post We\u2019re Still Moving \u2018Beyond Vietnam\u2019<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":526,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1457414"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/526"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1457414"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1457414\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1457415,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1457414\/revisions\/1457415"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1457414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1457414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1457414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}