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. . .
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. 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 Latin 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 hands 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 veins of people 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.
These words are just as necessary today as they were on April 4, 1967, one year before King's death.
Here's an interesting editorial in the Ithaca Journal, referencing this speech:
The key to nonviolent social protest is an underlying assumption that most people are basically decent souls, but tend to look the other way too often. In our natural desire to live at peace, we're too quick to deny injustice that swirls around us. Hold up a mirror, force people to see what they can no longer deny, and that sleeping decency will awaken. When that happens, the world changes.
That was the method of Martin Luther King Jr., and for more than a decade - from the Montgomery bus boycott through the march on Washington - he forced America to stare in the mirror and see institutional racial segregation. We did, and for the first time since the crucible of the Civil War, America lurched a little bit closer to fulfilling the promise of liberty and equality laced into our creation.
Of course, we all know this story. Most of us where born after the civil rights movement began and we inherited a world King already changed. We grew up knowing King as a hero, a champion against Southern ignorance and outdated institutions. For us, he stands in front of a line of well-dressed, well-mannered African-Americans as they walk into rednecks, fire hoses and dogs. He cries “I have a dream” in front of a giant marble Abraham Lincoln in the summer of 1963 and a quarter-million people cheer. Somewhere he smiles as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 are passed. Then he pops up again in 1968, on the eve of his assassination, telling us all that someday we'll reach the Promised Land.
It's a convenient tale. Tragic, but comforting and complete. He held up a mirror. America looked into it and changed, and he said we'd get even better.
A convenient easy-to-live-with tale, but an incomplete and dishonest one.
King didn't fade away after leading the effort to dismantle Jim Crow's laws. His deep religious faith, his deep commitment to nonviolence and his deep love of his nation and his world led him to raise new mirrors - mirrors we have yet to have the courage to face. . .
Since his death we've sanitized King. We've stripped him of the messages we don't want to hear, the mirrors we don't want to see, and made him a hero we can live with; a hero we can feel good about.
As we celebrate, injustice still swirls around us. Economic and social racism remains, North and South. American militarism, corporate piracy and global arrogance has spread from Southeast Asia to the Americas, Africa, the Middle East and beyond. Millions upon millions in America, and billions in the world, continue to live in poverty while wave after wave of wealthy leaders promise prosperity will one day trickle down. Comfortable populations in the material-obsessed industrialized world, basically decent souls, still look away.
Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. That great man deserves this honor.
But he deserves more.
America's greatest social reformer of the 20th century deserves the attention and honesty of his 21st century heirs. King deserves not just our celebration, but our discomfort as we face the mirrors of all the unmet challenges that great reformer left behind. And King deserves our courage as we summon the latent decency in all of us and begin again to change the world.
Until that day, we can pause every year on the third Monday of January in the name of Martin Luther King Jr., but we have yet to learn. Until we learn and change, we have yet to honor the man.
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