Today is what would have been the 87th birthday of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., one of the greatest Americans our people have ever produced, as Tavis Smiley has said..While our conservative friends like to focus on the Dr King pre-August 1963, the reality is that Dr King had a lot more profound things to say about America beyond the March on Washington 'I Have A Dream' speech.
Much of what he wrote and said not only during his all too brief life, and especially post August 1963 is just as fresh and relevant in 2016 America as it was at the time when he uttered those words.
And yes, he is a sterling example of speaking truth to power.
This is an excerpt from the 1967 'Beyond Vietnam' speech that he gave at New York's Riverside Church one year before he was assassinated on April 4, 1968. I think it is so appropriate that we read and heed those words in this critical election year for our country.
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—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 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 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 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 a 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.
Happy birthday Dr. King. America is a much better nation because of you, and had you been blessed with longevity, would be an even better nation. That's up to us to make that dream of yours a reality.
