From Dr. King’s anti-war speech “Beyond Vietnam,” April 4, 1967, Riverside Church, New York City.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. … 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 Latin 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 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.
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.
Kai Wright has written a good article about the whitewashing of Dr. King’s politics. The radicalism of his vision, against racism but also against poverty and against war, is too often forgotten.
a couple things that struck me….
from the American Prospect Article:
“Each King holiday and memorial spawns another round of ‘Where’s Waldo?’ pondering over who our new leader is, or should be, or if one exists at all….I just wish our last [prophet] would come back and remind us that our power lies not in leadership but in a collective refusal to be oppressed.”
-this is pure genius. the ‘Where’s Waldo?’ analogy is so fitting…and concerning a collective resolution not to be oppressed, it should be taken into consideration that Dr. King’s leadership abilities were cultivated in NAACP, a collective organization.
speech excerpt from progress.org:
“We have come a long way in our understanding of human motivation and of the blind operation of our economic system. Now we realize that dislocations in the market operation of our economy and the prevalence of discimination thrust people into idleness and bind them in constant or frequent unemployment against their will.”
this, to me, is the most compelling argument in favor of guaranteed income. though, dare I say, this is somewhat optimistic. after seeing hurricane katrina victims squander voucher money, I’m a little wary of such measures….but perhaps a long term program would have better results…
Another enlightening quote (if I may):
“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.”
As succinctly stated as I have ever read. Progressives constantly preach the corruption of the human soul, but no one ever offers sound methods for reversing inherent human selfishness.
[Robert’s response to Jawai led to an exchange between me and Robert which is nowhere close to on topic — for which I’m to blame as much as, or more than, Robert. So I’ve moved Rob’s comment and my responses to an open thread. –Amp]