Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. And so we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. And so we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.
My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.
[Taken from "Beyond Vietnam - A Time to Break Silence" @ http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm]
Guess what? Surprise, surprise !!! The United States is STILL the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today:
http://www.mintpressnews.com/pentagon-approves-record-sale-of-advanced-arms-to-countries-at-war/173618/
Ironically, WE are the true "prisoners of war" of America's conflicts. In nearly every single instance of conflict since World War Two, we have rejected diplomatic means and sought to impose our will using military might. Having drunk the intoxicating liquor of our foe's unconditional surrender, we seemingly can find no other way to interact with the rest of the world.
This will cease when we are broke ... and the nations of the world will breath a HUGE sigh of relief when it happens.
No comments:
Post a Comment