Silence is betrayal
“A time comes when silence is betrayal.”
Taken from Dr. King’s speech on April 4th 1967 exactly one year before he was assassinated.
I wanted to talk about his very important speech today which marks the 50th anniversary since it was made in New York City. There are so many things that make this speech and it’s timing rather eerie that I wanted to point out a few things about it. The very first things that was not abundantly clear was that he was killed exactly one year to the day after this speech was made. Two, he had begun to challenge the system of government, its treatment of poor people worldwide, and the hypocrisy of our country when it came to our own behavior towards its citizens. I will attempt to address many similarities to this speech, and our current administration today in 2017. I will also address the silence of the church in 2017 and how virtually silent they have become in times where they need to be the loudest. Finally I will expose the racist actions and attitudes of this current administration and those in this country who think this country wants to go back to post civil war times. We all have to be clear with what double talk is really about and what it means. “Make America Great Again“, is code for lets go back 60 years. Those who are conscious are not fooled at all, and those who are asleep I will attempt to awaken.
“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 on 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.
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.
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 was 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.
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. 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. Moreover, I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. 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. So such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.
It is with such activity 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 to 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.
So, I pulled out these different excerpts because the stood out to me. He talked about so many things in that time that are true to this day. He was say the war in Vietnam, but this is true for so many other things this country has done to date, Iraq, The folks in the Middle East, Muslims, and the poor in our country today. He talked about the spirit of this country and how it has become callus and cold, He talked about the poor and how we attacked the poor in other countries while we have done the same to the poor in our own country. He made reference to the church and how we need to stand up for the voiceless. He talked about the three main forces back then that were incapable of being conquered were racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.
The scary reality is that the things he spoke of 50 years ago are some of the same demons we are still trying to conquer today. This country has a horrible past that it has tried to run from but the time is now that we face it. We will never be able to truly face this horrible past until we speak it out and confess it’s wrong. We are repeating the same horrible behaviors even today with what we have allowed to happen in our most recent election. How can we as a nation say its okay to a white house that lies? How can we say it’s okay to not hold this current administration to the standards that every other administration has been held to? How can the church of God be so silent when it comes to people being mistreated and not defended by those who call themselves men and women of God? Why have we lowered our standards as people who claim to be wise in this information age? It is appalling to me that we have lowered ourselves as a whole to these type of standards.
I am here to wake up the conscious of America and the world for that reason. We must look at what has happened and allow it to be a driving force for change in our society. We can no longer afford to ignore our very daunting past. It is affecting our future in so many ways. We have failed to educate our young people properly so they are living a reality that is false. The narrative that has been forced fed to us for years has been filled with deceit. American history is all of Americas past not just what people who are driving this false narrative which are lies want to tell. This has led to a generation of people today who are seeking truth to face the reality of many, many lies told. We owe them the truth. It’s crazy that the world is teaching more truth about our history then we are as a country. It’s time to wake up and call this country out on its hypocrisy. It’s time to demand integrity out of those who claim to represent us as a nation. It’s time to demand truth from our leaders both in the church and in office. Enough is enough, and this speech was a wakeup call for me amongst many other things that has awaken my consciousness,
I am so over people playing church, ministers who are too afraid to speak truth to very real issues that face many of their members. We won’t speak the truth about racism in the church today. We talk about prosperity, money and not poverty or the less fortunate. We won’t empower people to understand wealth in its entirety. We don’t help the poor unless they are member’s smh… We have preachers who are not true shepherds who lead by example. They don’t serve but want to be served. We have respect of persons when scripture is clear that God has no respect of persons. We are not known by our love as the church when that’s the only commandment God gave to us in the New Testament. We are surely known for our judgement of others with no love in such judging. We are known for our self- righteousness, but scriptures says that our righteousness is as of filthy rags to God. So what kind of example are we setting in this world as believers? Yet we wonder why young people are running away from the church. If we can’t speak truth to power how can we say we are followers of God? Unfortunately we have to speak the truth about the state of the church today before we can ever draw people in by the multitudes. I say again enough is enough!
Sorry for the length of this blog but not sorry for enlightening those who choose to read. The bible says in all thy getting get understanding, and I encourage you to make it a priority to always have a true understanding of who you are and what is going on. Our silence is betrayal especially we choose to say nothing.
As always have a great day!
D