Urgent Choices
For more than twenty years I have spent April 4th with Dr. Martin Luther King’s speech Beyond Vietnam: Breaking the Silence. This year marked the 55th anniversary of the evening at Riverside Church where King called the US the “greatest purveyor of violence” on earth. He identified militarism, materialism, and racism as the cornerstones of a culture of violence moving us toward “spiritual death.”
This year I joined with the Breaking Silence Project for a virtual gathering that included an introduction by Rev. James Lawson, a comrade of Dr. King, and life long advocate for non-violence. The reading by well-known activists was followed by an engaging panel discussion led by Stephen Ward of the Boggs Center. Robin D.G. Kelley, Andrea Ritchie, Crystal Cavalier, Justin Pearson and Nse Ufot talked about how much the speech still remains relevant and how much work we have to do to create loving communities rooted in a culture of peace.
This year, as the world is engaged in the most dangerous armed conflict since WWII, King’s call for peace seems especially important. Rev. Lawson called for a nonviolent movement for peace far beyond anything we have seen. He identified the hypocrisies of our own country, defending democracy in Ukraine but not voting rights in Georgia or Texas. He talked about our concern for children fleeing Russian bombs, while refusing to protect children in the first year of life in the US. And he offered the hope that this is a moment of new choices, new opportunities to look honestly at who we are, and the kind of people we may yet become, if we make the right choices.
But the world of today is much more violent and dangerous than it was on the night King spoke. Over this half century, we have engaged in war after war, advanced our weapons of mass destruction, created sophisticated mechanisms of thought control, and systematically undereducated our people. The crises we face are not only those of military conflict and nuclear catastrophe, but collapsing ecological systems no longer able to sustain life.
We are in the midst of an earth shift. All that was once solid has melted into air. Yet, it is the control of capital and the drive for profit that continue to shape the decisions that are destroying life. Here, the call from Dr. King still resonates when he said:
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, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
Shortly after the reading of King’s speech I read a statement by Rafael de la Rubia, founder of Organization World without Wars and Violence. He, like Rev Lawson and Dr. King calls us to move in “a clear direction towards multilateralism and towards solving the main problems of humanity: hunger, health, education and the integration of all peoples and cultures…so that the brutes who represent us are made aware: we can no longer afford more armed conflicts. Wars are the dregs of humanity. The future will be without war or not at all.”
Or, as King says, " We still have a choice today; nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace” and “rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter—but beautiful—struggle for a new world.”