Progressive Calendar 04.07.07
From: David Shove (shove001tc.umn.edu)
Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2007 02:46:54 -0700 (PDT)
             P R O G R E S S I V E   C A L E N D A R   04.07.07

1. Oaxaca update    4.07 10am
2. Homeless vets    4.07 10am
3. NWN4P vigil      4.07 11am
4. Green Party/StP  4.07 12noon
5. Women's art      4.07 1pm
6. Northtown vigil  4.07 2pm
7. Cuban 5/film     4.07 3pm
8. Lao heritage     4.07 5pm
9. Crit Israel?/TV  4.07 9pm

10. StillwaterVigil 4.08 1pm
11. KFAI's Indian   4.08 4pm
12. Vets for peace  4.08 6pm
13. Annual tree sale
14. Help LivGrnExpo

15. Cohen/Solomon  - The Martin Luther King you don't see on TV
16. Rev ML King Jr - 1967 Riverside Church Address: Beyond Vietnam

--------1 of 16--------

From: Charles Underwood <charleyunderwood [at] hotmail.com>
Subject: Oaxaca update 4.07 10am

Saturday, 4/7, 10 to 11:30 am, just back in March, Clare Urbanski will
present "Update on Oaxaca," Resource Center of the Americas, 3019 Minnehaha
Ave, Mpls.  www.americas.org


--------2 of 16--------

From: Charles Underwood <charleyunderwood [at] hotmail.com>
Subject: Homeless vets 4.07 10am

Saturday, 4/7 (and each 1st Saturday), 10 to 11:30 am, Homeless Veterans for
Peace meeting, Peacehouse, 510 E Franklin Ave, Mpls.  Bob Heberle at
612-789-9020


--------3 of 16--------

From: Carole Rydberg <carydberg [at] comcast.net>
Subject: NWN4P 4.07 11am

NWN4P-Minnetonka demonstration- Every Saturday, 11 AM to noon, at Hwy. 7
and 101.  Park in the Target Greatland lot; meet near the
fountain. We will walk along the public sidewalk. Bring your own signs.


--------4 of 16--------

From: ed
Subject: StP Green Party 4.07 12noon

All people interested in finding out more about the Green Party of St. Paul
are invited to:

Our monthly meeting
First Saturday of every month
Mississippi Market, 2nd floor
Corner of Selby/Dale in St. Paul
noon until 2 pm
<http://www.gpsp.org>


--------5 of 16--------

From: erin [at] mnwomen.org
Subject: Women's art 4.07 1pm

April 7: Women's Art Registry of Minnesota (WARM). Monthly visit to art show
followed by discussion at a nearby coffee shop. The Buoyant Heart and
Involuntary Tuning. Catherine G. Murphy Gallery, College of St. Catherine,
2004 Randolph Avenue, S. Paul. 1-3 PM. www.thewarm.org.


--------6 of 16--------

From: Lennie <major18 [at] comcast.net>
Subject: Northtown vigil 4.07 2pm

Mounds View peace vigil EVERY SATURDAY from 2-3pm at the at the southeast
corner of the intersection of Co. Hwy 10 and University Ave NE in Blaine,
which is the northwest most corner of the Northtown Mall area. This is a
MUCH better location.

We'll have extra signs.  Communities situated near the Northtown Mall
include: Blaine, Mounds View, New Brighton, Roseville, Shoreview, Arden
Hills, Spring Lake Park, Fridley, and Coon Rapids.

For further information, email major18 [at] comcast.net or call Lennie at
763-717-9168


--------7 of 16--------

From: Minnesota Cuba Committee <mncuba [at] usfamily.net>
Subject: Cuban 5/film 4.07 3pm

3:00-5:00, Saturday, April 7
Rondo Community Outreach Library
461 North Dale St., St. Paul (at Dale & University)
Metro Transit Lines #6 & #50

HANDS OFF CUBA, VENEZUELA AND BOLIVIA!
FREEDOM FOR THE CUBAN FIVE!

Preview a new Cuban film about the Cuban 5; first screened in Havana on
January 27

Panel: August Nimtz, U of MN professor, Minnesota Cuba Committee, just
returned from Cuba
John Peterson, Hands Off Venezuela Committee

This program will coincide with actions in new York and Los Angeles
protesting U.S. policy toward Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia. It will unite
with puerto Rican solidarity organizations that were organizing protests
for April 7, the 30th anniversary of the incarceration of Puerto Rican
independence fighters.

Sponsored by Minnesota Cuba Committee and Hands Off Venezuela Committee

http://groups.msn.com/minnesotacubacommittee
612 623-3452 or 651 983-3981


--------8 of 16--------

From: Jane Powers <janepow [at] earthlink.net>
Subject: Lao heritage 4.07 5pm

Lao Heritage Showcase   [Get the Real Lao Down -ed]
April 7, 2007  (Saturday)
5:00 to 9:00 pm
McNamara Alumni Center (Un of Minnesota):
200 Oak Street SE,  Minneapolis

Presented by:  Lao Student Association  (lsa [at] umn.edu)

An evening of celebration with an art exhibition, music and dance
performances, traditional food, and benefit auction.
For more information contact:  Tony at 612.723.9040


--------9 of 16--------

From: Eric Angell <eric-angell [at] riseup.net>
Subject: Criticize Israel/TV 4.07 9pm

Minneapolis Television Network (MTN 17) viewers:

"Our World In Depth" cablecasts weekly in Minneapolis on MTN!  Households
with basic cable can watch.  MTN cablecasts are on Channel 17 Saturdays at
9 pm and the following Tuesday at 8 am.  Below are the scheduled shows
through April 14:

Sat, 4/7, 9 pm "Is Criticism of Israel Anti-Semitic: An Evening with
Norman Finkelstein".  Part 2 of a talk given 11/5 in Mpls.


--------10 of 16--------

From: scot b <earthmannow [at] comcast.net>
Subject: Stillwater vigil 4.08 1pm

A weekly Vigil for Peace Every Sunday, at the Stillwater bridge from 1- 2
p.m.  Come after Church or after brunch ! All are invited to join in song
and witness to the human desire for peace in our world. Signs need to be
positive.  Sponsored by the St. Croix Valley Peacemakers.

If you have a United Nations flag or a United States flag please bring it.
Be sure to dress for the weather . For more information go to
<http://www.stcroixvalleypeacemakers.com/>http://www.stcroixvalleypeacemakers.com/

For more information you could call 651 275 0247 or 651 999 - 9560


--------11 of 16--------

From: Chris Spotted Eagle <chris [at] spottedeagle.org>
Subject: KFAI's Indian  4.08 4pm

KFAI's Indian Uprising for April 8, 2007  #208

Intro - JOHN TRUDELL (Santee Sioux), spoken-word performance artist. Hear,
Crazy Horse, from his CD "Bone Days" ASITIS Productions (2001),
www.johntrudell.com.

RECONCILING MORAL OUTRAGE WITH SELF-DETERMINATION by Sheryl Lightfoot
(Ojibwe), Indian Country Today, March 09, 2007.  ³We, as citizens of other
sovereign indigenous nations, are absolutely and completely compelled to
support the right of the Cherokee Nation to exercise this power. But at
the same time, it makes many of us squirm in our chairs to feel compelled
to support an action that involves the active disenrollment of members, an
action that results in stripping away citizenship rights of certain
individuals, especially where issues of race, slavery and historical
racism are involved. Should a person really be stripped of tribal
citizenship merely because part of their ancestry can be traced to the
slaves once held by the Cherokee? Can we truly support this move, which is
a deeply disturbing trend in Indian country? It places us in a moral
dilemma.² http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096414629.

HOUSTON COUNCILMAN SAYS HE WAS WRONG ABOUT AMERICAN INDIANS by Brenda
Norrell.  HOUSTON -- Houston Councilman Michael Berry, who serves as mayor
pro tem, now says his radio comments which insulted American Indians were
wrong. Berry says he was re-educated by American Indian responses. Houston
Natives, however, say they'll wait and see if Berry has had a true change
of heart. http://www.bsnorrell.blogspot.com/ April 5, 2007.

CANADA¹S PLAN EXPOSED TO ASSASSINATE MOHAWKS by Brenda Norrell, Human
Rights Editor U.N. OBSERVER & International Report, April 1, 2007.
Canadian military planned deception, ambushes and killing of Mohawks,
Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad in new counterinsurgency manual

http://www.bsnorrell.blogspot.com/.

THE IROQUOIS WAY OF IMPEACHMENT (Let the Mothers Do It) by Kaz Dziamka,
Counterpunch, March 24, 2007.  ³Not only does American democracy rank a
miserable 17th on the list of the world's modern democracies (according to
the Economist Intelligence Unit's index of democracy); it also doesn't
fare well when compared with traditional Native American democracies, in
particular, with the Iroquois Confederacy--the Haudenosaunee--"the oldest
living participatory democracy on earth."
http://www.counterpunch.org/dziamka03242007.html.

* * * *
Indian Uprising a one-half hour Public & Cultural Affairs program is for and
by Indigenous People broadcast each Sunday at 4:00 p.m. over KFAI 90.3 FM
Minneapolis and 106.7 FM St. Paul.  Producer and host is volunteer Chris
Spotted Eagle.  KFAI Fresh Air Radio is located at 1808 Riverside Avenue,
Minneapolis MN 55454, 612-341-3144.  www.kfai.org.

Programs can be heard via KFAI's live streaming using RealAudio or MP3.  Go
to http://www.kfai.org and click "Programs & Schedule" or by program
³Archives.²


--------12 of 16--------

From: scot b <earthmannow [at] comcast.net>
Subject: Vets for peace 4.08 6pm

Sunday, 4/8, 6 pm (and the 2nd Sunday of each month), Veterans for Peace
chapter 24 meeting, St Stephens School basement, 2130 Clinton Ave S, Mpls.
waynewittman [at] msn.com


--------13 of 16--------

From: Steven Hauser <hause011 [at] tc.umn.edu>
Subject: Annual tree sale

- The Friends of the Parks and Trails of St. Paul and Ramsey County are
having their annual Tree Sale which supports work like the recently
enacted St. Paul Park Dedication Ordinance to expand the park system when
land is developed in St. Paul.

- Order by April 18!
http://www.friendsoftheparks.org/treeorder.htm
or email PeggyLynch [at] visi.com for an order brochure.

- Choices:

big tree: Red Maple -native species 45.00
big tree: Northern Red Oak -native species 45.00
shrub: Pagoda Dogwood -native species 15.00
big tree: Black Hills Spruce 35.00
big tree: Purple Robe Locust 35.00
big tree: Japanese Tree Lilac 30.00
small tree: Magnolia Royal Star 40.00
small tree: Indian Magic Crab Tree 30.00
small tree: Red Jade Crab 30.00
shrub: Royal Purple Smokebush 15.00
vine: Wisteria,Aunt Dee 15.00
shrub rose: Morden Sunrise, yellow 20.00
shrub: Chippewa+NorthernBlue Blueberry, 2 plants 25.00

- Local Park Systems that accept donated trees through the tree sale:

Ramsey County, Dakota County, Apple Valley, Arden Hills, Blaine, Brooklyn
Park Champlin, Cottage Grove, Eagan, Falcon Heights, Little Canada,
Maplewood, Mendota Heights, New Brighton, North St. Paul, St. Louis Park,
St. Paul, Shoreview, South St. Paul, Vadnais Heights, West St. Paul, White
Bear Lake, White Bear Township


--------14 of 16--------

From: snyde043 <snyde043 [at] tc.umn.edu>
Subject: Help LivGreenExpo

The 6th Annual Living Green Expo, May 5th and 6th, is just around
the corner and if you haven't had the opportunity to attend in years
past, here's your chance.

The Expo which features over 70 workshops and 200 exhibitors is an event
to behold. If you'd like to do more than simply attend the event, many
volunteers are needed for the Expo, held at the State Fairgrounds,
(Grandstand Building) in St. Paul. Come and connect with others, find
resources, and get in on the latest green technologies.

Volunteers are needed to help with the following:

Setup, Food Shelf Donations, Recycling Educators, Workshops, Front Door
Duty, Kids' Area, Information table and volunteer check-in, Surveys,
Exhibitor assistance, and Take-down.

For a description of these tasks and to sign up to volunteer, visit:
http://www.livinggreen.org/volunteer.cfm

Volunteers get a free shirt, free organic food to eat and drink, and an
invite to our after-hours party.

See you at the 6th annual Living Green Expo!  www.livinggreen.org
Mark Snyder Northeast Minneapolis


--------15 of 16--------

The Missing Years
The Martin Luther King You Don't See on TV
By JEFF COHEN and NORMAN SOLOMON
CounterPunch
April 4, 2007

It's become a TV ritual: Every year on April 4, as Americans commemorate
Martin Luther King's death, we get perfunctory network news reports about
"the slain civil rights leader."

The remarkable thing about these reviews of King's life is that several
years--his last years--are totally missing, as if flushed down a memory
hole.

What TV viewers see is a closed loop of familiar file footage: King
battling desegregation in Birmingham (1963); reciting his dream of racial
harmony at the rally in Washington (1963); marching for voting rights in
Selma, Alabama (1965); and finally, lying dead on the motel balcony in
Memphis (1968).

An alert viewer might notice that the chronology jumps from 1965 to 1968.
Yet King didn't take a sabbatical near the end of his life. In fact, he
was speaking and organizing as diligently as ever.

Almost all of those speeches were filmed or taped. But they're not shown
today on TV.

Why?

It's because national news media have never come to terms with what Martin
Luther King Jr. stood for during his final years.

In the early 1960s, when King focused his challenge on legalized racial
discrimination in the South, most major media were his allies. Network TV
and national publications graphically showed the police dogs and bullwhips
and cattle prods used against Southern blacks who sought the right to vote
or to eat at a public lunch counter.

But after passage of civil rights acts in 1964 and 1965, King began
challenging the nation's fundamental priorities. He maintained that civil
rights laws were empty without "human rights"--including economic rights.
For people too poor to eat at a restaurant or afford a decent home, King
said, anti-discrimination laws were hollow.

Noting that a majority of Americans below the poverty line were white,
King developed a class perspective. He decried the huge income gaps
between rich and poor, and called for "radical changes in the structure of
our society" to redistribute wealth and power.

"True compassion," King declared, "is more than flinging a coin to a
beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs
restructuring."

By 1967, King had also become the country's most prominent opponent of the
Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he
deemed militaristic. In his "Beyond Vietnam" speech delivered at New
York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 a year to the day before he was
murdered King called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence
in the world today." (Full text here)

>From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, King said, the U.S. was "on
the wrong side of a world revolution." King questioned "our alliance with
the landed gentry of Latin America," and asked why the U.S. was
suppressing revolutions "of the shirtless and barefoot people" in the
Third World, instead of supporting them.

In foreign policy, King also offered an economic critique, complaining
about "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."

You haven't heard the "Beyond Vietnam" speech on network news
retrospectives, but national media heard it loud and clear back in
1967--and loudly denounced it. Time magazine called it "demagogic slander
that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi." The Washington Post
patronized that "King has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his
country, his people."

In his last months, King was organizing the most militant project of his
life: the Poor People's Campaign. He crisscrossed the country to assemble
"a multiracial army of the poor" that would descend on
Washington--engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol, if
need be--until Congress enacted a poor people's bill of rights. Reader's
Digest warned of an "insurrection."

King's economic bill of rights called for massive government jobs programs
to rebuild America's cities. He saw a crying need to confront a Congress
that had demonstrated its "hostility to the poor"--appropriating "military
funds with alacrity and generosity," but providing "poverty funds with
miserliness."

How familiar that sounds today, nearly 40 years after King's efforts on
behalf of the poor people's mobilization were cut short by an assassin's
bullet.

In 2007, in this nation of immense wealth, the White House and most in
Congress continue to accept the perpetuation of poverty. They fund foreign
wars with "alacrity and generosity," while being miserly in dispensing
funds for education and healthcare and environmental cleanup.

And those priorities are largely unquestioned by mainstream media. No
surprise that they tell us so little about the last years of Martin Luther
King's life.

Jeff Cohen is the author of "Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in
Corporate Media."

Norman Solomon is the author of War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits
Keep Spinning Us to Death.


--------16 of 16--------

40 Years Ago Today
Riverside Church Address
Beyond Vietnam
By Rev. MARTIN LUTHER KING, Jr.
CounterPunch
April 4, 2007

To the Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam Riverside Church, April
4, 1967, New York City, New York

Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, I need not pause to say how very
delighted I am to be here tonight, and how very delighted I am to see you
expressing your concern about the issues that will be discussed tonight by
turning out in such large numbers. I also want to say that I consider it a
great honor to share this program with Dr. Bennett, Dr. Commager, and
Rabbi Heschel, some of the distinguished leaders and personalities of our
nation. And of course it's always good to come back to Riverside Church.
Over the last eight years, I have had the privilege of preaching here
almost every year in that period, and it is always a rich and rewarding
experience to come to this great church and this great pulpit.

I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience
leaves me no other choice. I join you in this meeting because I am in
deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has
brought us together, Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam. 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." 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 perplexing 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.

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 movement, 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.

Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own
silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called
for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have
questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns,
this query has often loomed large and loud: "Why are you speaking about
the war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent?" "Peace and
civil rights don't mix," they say. "Aren't you hurting the cause of your
people? "they ask. And when I hear them, though I often understand the
source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such
questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment,
or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the
world in which they live. In the light of such tragic misunderstanding, I
deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly, and I trust
concisely, why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist
Church-the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate-leads
clearly to this sanctuary tonight.

I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved
nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National
Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia. Nor is it an
attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for
a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt
to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue,
nor to overlook the role they must play in the successful resolution of
the problem. While they both may have justifiable reasons to be suspicious
of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent
testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful
give and take on both sides. Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with
Hanoi and the National Liberation Front, but rather to my fellow
Americans.

Since I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not surprising that I
have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral
vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection
between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging
in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle.
It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black
and white, through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new
beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program
broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a
society gone mad on war. And I knew that America would never invest the
necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as
adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like
some demonic, destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to
see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

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. 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. 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 asked,
and rightly so, "What about Vietnam?" They asked 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.

For those who ask the question, "Aren't you a civil rights leader?" and
thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this
further answer. In 1957, when a group of us formed the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save the soul of
America." We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain
rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America
would never be free or saved from itself until the descendants of its
slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way
we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had
written earlier: O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath- America will be! Now it should be
incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and
life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul
becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read "Vietnam." It can
never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world
over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that "America will
be" are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health
of our land.

As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America
were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in
1954.* And I cannot forget that the Nobel Peace Prize was also a
commission, a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for
the brotherhood of man. This is a calling that takes me beyond national
allegiances.

But even if it were not present, I would yet have to live with the meaning
of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me, the relationship
of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes
marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be
that they do not know that the Good News was meant for all men-for
communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for
white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my
ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he
died for them? What then can I say to the Vietcong or to Castro or to Mao
as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death or must
I not share with them my life?

Finally, as I try to explain for you and for myself the road that leads
from Montgomery to this place, I would have offered all that was most
valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share
with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling
of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood.
Because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned, especially for His
suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for
them. This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who
deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and
deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined
goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the
voiceless, for the victims of our nation, for those it calls "enemy," for
no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways
to understand and respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly to the
people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side,
not of the ideologies of the Liberation Front, not of the junta in Saigon,
but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for
almost three continuous decades now. I think of them, too, because it is
clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some
attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries.

They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people
proclaimed their own independence in 1954-in 1945 rather-after a combined
French and Japanese occupation and before the communist revolution in
China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American
Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused
to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest
of her former colony. Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people
were not ready for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly
Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so
long. With that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary government
seeking self-determination and a government that had been established not
by China-for whom the Vietnamese have no great love-but by clearly
indigenous forces that included some communists. For the peasants this new
government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in
their lives.

For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of
independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their
abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam. Before the end of the war we were
meeting eighty percent of the French war costs. Even before the French
were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of their reckless
action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge financial and
military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will.
Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at
recolonization.

After the French were defeated, it looked as if independence and land
reform would come again through the Geneva Agreement. But instead there
came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the
temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported
one of the most vicious modern dictators, our chosen man, Premier Diem.
The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly rooted out all
opposition, supported their extortionist landlords, and refused even to
discuss reunification with the North. The peasants watched as all of this
was presided over by United States influence and then by increasing
numbers of United States troops who came to help quell the insurgency that
Diem's methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been
happy, but the long line of military dictators seemed to offer no real
change, especially in terms of their need for land and peace.

The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in
support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and without
popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and received
the regular promises of peace and democracy and land reform. Now they
languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the
real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land
of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are
rarely met. They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs.

So they go, primarily women and children and the aged. They watch as we
poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must
weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the
precious trees. They wander into the hospitals with at least twenty
casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury. So
far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children. They wander
into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without
clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the
children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the
children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their
mothers.

What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as
we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform?
What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the
Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration
camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim
to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?

We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and
the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have
cooperated in the crushing of the nation's only noncommunist revolutionary
political force, the unified Buddhist Church. We have supported the
enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and
children and killed their men.

Now there is little left to build on, save bitterness. Soon the only solid
physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in
the concrete of the concentration camps we call "fortified hamlets." The
peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such
grounds as these. Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for
them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These, too, are our
brothers.

Perhaps a more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those
who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National Liberation
Front, that strangely anonymous group we call "VC" or "communists"? What
must they think of the United States of America when they realize that we
permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem, which helped to bring them
into being as a resistance group in the South? What do they think of our
condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can
they believe in our integrity when now we speak of "aggression from the
North" as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they
trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign
of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of
death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings, even if
we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we
supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own
computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts.

How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less
than twenty-five percent communist, and yet insist on giving them the
blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware
of their control of major sections of Vietnam, and yet we appear ready to
allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel
government will not have a part? They ask how we can speak of free
elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military
junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we
plan to help form without them, the only party in real touch with the
peasants. They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a
peace settlement from which they will be excluded. Their questions are
frighteningly relevant. Is our nation planning to build on political myth
again, and then shore it up upon the power of a new violence? Here is the
true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to
see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know his
assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic
weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and
grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the
opposition.

So, too, with Hanoi. In the North, where our bombs now pummel the land,
and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but
understandable mistrust. To speak for them is to explain this lack of
confidence in Western words, and especially their distrust of American
intentions now. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence
against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the
French Commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the
willfulness of the colonial armies. It was they who led a second struggle
against French domination at tremendous costs, and then were persuaded to
give up the land they controlled between the thirteenth and seventeenth
parallel as a temporary measure at Geneva. After 1954 they watched us
conspire with Diem to prevent elections which could have surely brought Ho
Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam, and they realized they had been
betrayed again. When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these
things must be remembered.

Also, it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence
of American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been the initial
military breach of the Geneva Agreement concerning foreign troops. They
remind us that they did not begin to send troops in large numbers and even
supplies into the South until American forces had moved into the tens of
thousands.

Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the
earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed
that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched
as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has
surely heard the increasing international rumors of American plans for an
invasion of the North. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are
doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps only his
sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful
nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs
on a poor, weak nation more than eight hundred, or rather, eight thousand
miles away from its shores.

At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last
few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand
the arguments of those who are called "enemy," I am as deeply concerned
about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what
we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process
that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy.
We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a
short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are
really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent
them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely
realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we
create a hell for the poor.

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of
God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose
land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture
is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the
double price of smashed hopes at home, and dealt death and corruption in
Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands
aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the
leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the
initiative to stop it must be ours.

This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one
of them wrote these words, and I quote:

Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the hearts of the
Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The
Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It
is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the
possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they
are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of
America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom, and
democracy, but the image of violence and militarism.

If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the
world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. If we do not stop
our war against the people of Vietnam immediately, the world will be left
with no other alternative than to see this as some horrible, clumsy, and
deadly game we have decided to play. The world now demands a maturity of
America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that
we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we
have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation
is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways. In
order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the
initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war.

I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do
immediately to begin the long and difficult process of extricating
ourselves from this nightmarish conflict:

Number one: End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.

Number two: Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action
will create the atmosphere for negotiation.

Three: Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast
Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our interference
in Laos.

Four: Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has
substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any
meaningful negotiations and any future Vietnam government.

Five: Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in
accordance with the 1954 Geneva Agreement.

Part of our ongoing [applause continues], part of our ongoing commitment
might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese
who fears for his life under a new regime which included the Liberation
Front. Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have
done. We must provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it
available in this country if necessary. Meanwhile [applause], meanwhile,
we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our
government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must
continue to raise our voices and our lives if our nation persists in its
perverse ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words
by seeking out every creative method of protest possible.

As we counsel young men concerning military service, we must clarify for
them our nation's role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative
of conscientious objection. [sustained applause] I am pleased to say that
this is a path now chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma
mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American
course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. [applause] Moreover, I
would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial
exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. [applause] These
are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment
when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its
own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that
best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.

Now there is something seductively tempting about stopping there and
sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade
against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter that struggle, but I wish
to go on now to say something even more disturbing.

The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the
American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality [applause], and if
we ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing "clergy
and laymen concerned" committees for the next generation. They will be
concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand
and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We
will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies
without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American
life and policy. [sustained applause] So such thoughts take us beyond
Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.

In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him
that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the
past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which has now
justified the presence of U.S. military advisors in Venezuela. This need
to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the
counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why
American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why
American napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active against
rebels in Peru.

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."
[applause] 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
[applause], 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 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. [sustained applause]

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. There is
nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised
hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against
communism. [applause] War is not the answer. Communism will never be
defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join
those who shout war and, through their misguided passions, urge the United
States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are
days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not
engage in a negative anticommunism, but rather in a positive thrust for
democracy [applause], realizing that our greatest defense against
communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with
positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity,
and injustice, which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism
grows and develops.

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting
against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds
of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The
shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before.
The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light. We in the West
must support these revolutions.

It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of
communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations
that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world
have now become the arch antirevolutionaries. This has driven many to feel
that only Marxism has a revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a
judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on
the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability
to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile
world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With
this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and
unjust mores, and thereby speed the day when "every valley shall be
exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low [Audience:] (Yes);
the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain."

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our
loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must
now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to
preserve the best in their individual societies.

This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond
one's tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an
all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind. This oft
misunderstood, this oft misinterpreted concept, so readily dismissed by
the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become
an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am
not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I'm not speaking of
that force which is just emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which
all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of
life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to
ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about
ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint
John: "Let us love one another (Yes), for love is God. (Yes) And every one
that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not
God, for God is love. . . . If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and
his love is perfected in us." Let us hope that this spirit will become the
order of the day.

We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar
of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the
ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of
nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As
Arnold Toynbee says: "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving
choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil.
Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is
going to have the last word." Unquote.

We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are
confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of
life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination
is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and
dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not
remain at flood-it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in
her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the
bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written
the pathetic words, "Too late." There is an invisible book of life that
faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right:
"The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on."

We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent
coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new
ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing
world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall
surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time
reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without
morality, and strength without sight.

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter,
but beautiful, struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons
of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the
odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our
message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival
as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another
message-of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of
commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and
though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment
of human history.

As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently stated:

Once to every man and nation comes a moment to decide, In the strife of
Truth and Falsehood, for the good or evil side; Some great cause, God's
new Messiah offering each the bloom or blight, And the choice goes by
forever 'twixt that darkness and that light. Though the cause of evil
prosper, yet 'tis truth alone is strong Though her portions be the
scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong Yet that scaffold sways the future,
and behind the dim unknown Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch
above his own.

And if we will only make the right choice, we will be able to transform
this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of peace. If we will make
the right choice, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of
our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. If we will but make
the right choice, we will be able to speed up the day, all over America
and all over the world, when justice will roll down like waters, and
righteousness like a mighty stream.

* King says "1954," but most likely means 1964, the year he received the
Nobel Peace Prize.


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