What Would MLK Do?

Sometimes the quagmire in Iraq and the corruption here in America seem like problems too big to tackle. There is a growing opinion that we just have to wait until after the 2008 elections to solve these problems. Even President Bush has said that getting out of Iraq will the be the job of a future president. We all just need to stay the course.

During Martin Luther King, Jr.’s life time, the great quagmire was the Vietnam War. On April 4th, 1967 Dr. King made it clear where he stood on the issue of Vietnam. At a meeting of concerned clergy and laity at Riverside Church in New Your City, Martin Luther King made it clear that people of conscience, himself included, could not wait and remain silent as America conducted a war in Asia.

Read, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence”, and I think you will agree that our situation is very similar to that situation. You can almost replace the word “Vietnam” with the word “Iraq.” The entire text is available online at: http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/058.html

We cannot remain silent and wait for 2008. Many lives can be saved by our actions today.

Below are some excerpts from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech:

“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.”

“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.”

‘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.

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”