The Prophetic Voice

It’s a years-long ritual for me to spend time listening to, and reflecting on, Martin Luther King Jr. speeches on the national holiday dedicated to him. Amy Goodman and Democracy Now! makes it easy by airing a special program featuring excerpts from select speeches, usually “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” delivered April 4, 1967 at Riverside Baptist Church, NYC, one year to the day before he was assassinated. This is widely considered King’s most radical speech and the backlash from the mainstream media was infamously swift and severe.

In today’s special, DN! features excerpts from both “Beyond Vietnam,” and the speech delivered the day before he was killed, “I’ve Been to the Mountain Top” (I See the Promised Land).

The holiday honors Dr. King’s birthday on January 15, 1929. He would be 97 years old today, and was only 39 years old when he was assassinated. The prophetic voice is a courageous voice for peace and justice that speaks truth to power. King’s own voice continues to thunder and echo and challenge us all. It’s amazing just how prophetic and relevant it continues to be! May it inspire you and feed your own deep longing for peace and justice and beauty.

Beyond Vietnam: A few excerpts

King quoting a Vietnamese Buddhist leader:

‘Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese 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.’

****

It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, ‘Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.’ Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. 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, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

****

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.

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.

****

This call for a worldwide 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 mankind. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept…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 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.

….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.’