Monday, January 21, 2019

"Go Down, Moses"

"Go Down, Moses"


On a day when we are called to remember and renew our calling, let us hear what a  real dream sounded like, a year before King was murdered.

From, The Trumpet of Conscience, Martin Luther King, Jr. Harper & Row, 1967:

“I have said that the problem, the crisis we face, is international in scope. In fact, it is inseparable from an international emergency which involves the poor, the dispossessed, and the exploited of the whole world.

Can a nonviolent, direct-action movement find application on the international level, to confront economic and political problems?  I believe it can.  It is clear to me that the next stage of the movement is to become international.  National movements, within the developed countries – forces that focus on London, or Paris, or Washington, or Ottawa – must help to make it politically feasible for their governments to undertake the kind of massive aid that the developing countries need if they are to break the chains of poverty.  We in the West must bear in mind that the poor countries are poor primarily because we have exploited them through political or economic colonialism.  Americans in particular must help their nation repent of her modern economic imperialism.

But movements in our countries alone will not be enough. In Latin America, for example, national reform movements have almost despaired of nonviolent methods; many young men, even many priests, have joined guerrilla movements in the hills.  So many of Latin America’s problems have roots in the United States of America that we need to form a solid, united movement, nonviolently conceived and carried through, so that pressure can be brought to bear on the capital and government power structures concerned, from both sides of the problem at once.  I think that may be the only hope for a nonviolent solution in Latin America today; and one of the most powerful expressions of nonviolence may come out of that international coalition of socially aware forces, operating outside governmental frameworks.

....Indeed, although it is obvious that nonviolent movements for social change must internationalize, because of the interlocking nature of the problems they all face, and because otherwise those problems will breed war, we have hardly begun to build the skills and the strategy, or even the commitment, to planetize our movement for social justice.

In a world facing the revolt of the ragged and hungry masses of God’s children, in a world torn between the tensions of the East and West, white and colored, individualists and collectivists, in a world whose cultural and spiritual power lags so far behind her technological capabilities that we live each day on the verge of nuclear co-annihilation; in this world, nonviolence is no longer an option for intellectual analysis, it is an imperative for action.”

[in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. Edited by James M. Washington. Harper & Row. 1967. pp. 652-53]

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From, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? Martin Luther King, Jr. Harper & Row. 1967:

“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 who pursued this self-defeating path of hate.  As Arnold Toynbee once said in a speech: ‘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.’

We are now faced with the fact 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 pause in her passage, but time is deaf 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. ‘The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on...’ We still have a choice today:  nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. This may well be mankind’s last chance to choose between chaos and community.”

[in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. Edited by James M. Washington. Harper & Row. 1967. pp. 632-33]


21 January 2019