Martin Luther King Day - 2008 - Where is the Love?

I heard MLK's great speech on WBEZ on the way back from my chiropractor appointment this morning: Beyond Vietnam speech . Absolutely mesmerizing. (text here) .... I'd never heard it before. I want to hear it again! It was a political speech he gave exactly one year before his death. It focused on Vietnam, but it was so so relevant for today. His predictions seem to have come true:

The recent statements of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart, and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: "A time comes when silence is betrayal." And that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.

The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.

And some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation's history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movements and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.

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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...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."

Listen to the WHOLE thing!

It was definitely one of those driveway times when you just can't pull yourself out of the car because you don't want to miss one single word. Where are our leaders? Who could do this today? Why do only politicians have a soapbox to stand on, ....

With my sister, we do a 15 minute music session for the 2nd -5th graders before their Sunday school classes. Yesterday we decided to have them listen to Springsteen's version of "We Shall Overcome" and sing it together. I also had downloaded a 3-min snippet .mp3 of Dr. King explaining the significance of this song in civil rights history. So I think it was surprising to some of them to actually hear his voice. I wish we had had more time to do more,.. it was a little out of the ordinary lesson for them. But whatever! That's the teacher's prerogative!

I wanted to play this Black Eyed Peas video too, but we didn't have time!