Words to remember

[redbird]

Forty years ago today, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., went to Riverside Church (which is here in Manhattan) and gave a speech against the Vietnam War. Here's a bit of it:

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.

Comments

[ruth-lawrence.livejournal.com]

He was right, of course :-(

[redbird]

Yes.

I was reminded of this by an approving mention in my daily paper (which also headlined "Queens [i.e. local] soldier killed in Iraq" on its front page, with a large photo of the man); the writer also noted that the "day in history" way of thinking or talking about King tends to associate 4 April with his death.

[thatcrazycajun.livejournal.com]

I often fantasize about getting ahold of a small time machine and going back to that Lorraine Motel room the night before to warn Dr. King about the sniper waiting for him the next day. Then I wonder if, being the man of the cloth he was, he would question whether his death was not foreordained by God for some higher purpose.

Then I look at what his people are suffering today, how his children squander his legacy (and I don't only mean those of his blood)...and all people, all over the world...and I decide I would not have the smallest problem playing God in such a hypothetical instance. Because (assuming, purely for argument's sake, that said deity even exists, of which I am in no wise convinced) from where I sit, God's made a whole humongous bundle of pretty damn big mistakes in this world of ours that badly need correcting...and letting this man get killed by an ignorant redneck with a 30.06 and a grudge is one of the biggest.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

"Approaching spiritual death"? Only approaching? Awfully mild word, actually.

[volund.livejournal.com]

Yes, it is mild, even bearing in mind that he was speaking in 1967.

Perhaps to be less mild would be to forgo hope, and that would have been atypical for Dr. King.

As for 2007 ...

[redbird]

Mild, or carefully chosen. If something is already dead, there's no hope of healing it, and Dr. King was calling people to action, not to mourning.