A Time to Break Silence
By Martin Luther King, Jr.

This anti-war speech was delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City. It is among his least known speeches and he would be killed almost a year to the day after delivering it.

Ed. note* We have inserted the word (Iraq) in parenthesis next to Vietnam, and in place of the word Communism we used the word (terrorism) in parentheses to give a sense of the eerie similarity of these situations.  This piece is a short excerpt from a much longer speech that is rich with history and a wonderful education for anyone wishing to get a sense of the trail that led from there to here.

Click here to read the entire article...

This Madness Must Cease

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam (Iraq). I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam (Iraq). I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours...

This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words:

"Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese (Iraqis) and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism."

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.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth... 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...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. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense... War is not the answer. (Terrorism) will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and through their misguided passions urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not call everyone a (terrorist). We must not engage in a negative anti-(terrorism), but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against (terrorism), is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity and injustice, which are the fertile soil in which the seed of (terrorism), grows and develops.

The People Are Important

...A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.

This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept -- so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force -- has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. 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. This Hindu-Moslem-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John:

Let us love one another; for love is God and everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. If we love one another God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us.

Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day. We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says : "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word."

We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The "tide in the affairs of men" does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: "Too late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on..." We still have a choice today; nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.

We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace…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.

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter -- but beautiful -- struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.

As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently stated:

Once to every man and nation
Comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth and falsehood,
For the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God's new Messiah,
Off'ring each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever
Twixt that darkness and that light.

Though the cause of evil prosper,
Yet 'tis truth alone is strong;
Though her portion be the scaffold,
And upon the throne be wrong:
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
And behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow
Keeping watch above his own.

To read a printable version of the entire talk Click here

En No Gyoja by Nicholas Roerich
Courtesy of the Oaktree Art Gallery

From Sorting it Out... by Tom Carney

...In the regime of the present un-elected U.S. President Bush this tool of co-opting or appropriating ideas of "light" to cloak schemes of darkness is all but being worn out. Thus we have the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 which cuts and or eliminates numerous budgets for essential programs for children at all levels of the public educational systems. Another example, a slight variation of the theme of this kind of manipulation, can be seen in leaving totally unfunded The Healthy and High Performance Schools Act of 2001.

To obscure the assault being made on the environment by these forces, we have actions being taken or proposed under the names of the Clean Air and Clean Water acts. These proposals and actions turn out, on inspection, to promote just the opposite of clean water or air. The following excerpt from an extensive analysis of Bush’s actions regarding clean water will illustrate.

 “Campaign promises and numerous public pronouncements to the contrary, since the first weeks of his administration, President George W. Bush has taken steps to systematically undermine or repeal the nation’s most important safeguards that protect clean water.   He has weakened or proposed to weaken programs that maintain water quality, cut huge sums for funding for clean water protections, scaled-back enforcement efforts, and even proposed eliminating all federal Clean Water Act protections from the majority of the nation’s streams, wetlands and other waters.  Individually, each of these measures means dirtier water for many Americans.   Taken together, these actions constitute the most concerted effort to dismantle the Clean Water Act since the law was enacted over three decades ago.”

One other example: Under the guise of “forest fire prevention”, the Bush Administration's Forest Service has proposed the "mechanical thinning of conifer" in California’s Sequoia National Monument. “Mechanical thinning of conifer” is the euphemism used to obfuscate the plan to allow logging in these ancient forests. The Sequoia National Monument is home to some of the world's tallest and oldest trees, reaching ages of 3,200 years. It is worth noting that these trees are probably the oldest living things on the dense physical plane on the planet. They reached this advanced age with no mechanical thinning or help of any other kind from the human kingdom. Perhaps we should be studying them to discover the secret of their longevity rather than planning to cut them down in the name of protecting them.

From the June 2004 Thoughtline http://www.meditationtraining.org/thoughtline/tl-2004-06.pdf