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.
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. [...]
[...] 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.” [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 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.
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. [applause]
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 year to the day later, fatally shot in the mouth. "Lone gunman," our government said.
I post this in large part because Rep. Clyburn could be a better man than he is, going forward, but at this point in his career and with an awareness of King's life cut short, dare he? Biden could adapt to a more humane policy toward our poor, per Bernie's insights, to be a better man, but dare he? Kennedy as President also questioned a status quo. Not as far as King did, but enough to suffer the so-called "single gunman acting alone" end that King met.
Bloomberg, a lost soul, money being his power-weapon which he wielded crudely and cruelly for establishment status quo perpetuation. Voters at least have rejected so coarse an approach as Bloomberg tried. (Something the Roberts court enabled, the coarseness of their outcome not being weighed sufficiently during Citizens United deliberation; for reasons the five member majority held utmost in their hearts.) That is really scary.
NEXT QUESTION: Who has been funding Clyburn's career which has taken the directions it has? And what is the lesson?
Two Wikipedia links - here and here - which may/may not in readers' minds be relevant to the remainder of the post, or to our present status quo, Hunter Biden and all. Goldman Sachs speeches, 2016. And what is the lesson?
UPDATE: Current thought is for caution and patience to see the end of the party convention and happenings between now and then to decide to either vote top ticket or leave a blank and vote down ticket only. Some might stay home, or insist they will unless ...
Even with Medicare for All being sabotaged by established greed (or other cause or excuse), restraint and attention should be shown now; i.e., at least see the planks in a platform upon which Biden will be running. To see what Bernie and Warren achieve at Convention. To see if Gabbard's Iraq veteran's viewpoint is stymied [dangerously unofficial, and worse a leading wave of a tide toward goring "wrong" Pentagon spending oxen - love mixed metaphors].
Presumptuous early decision making thus acknowledged as unneeded and counterproductive; something beyond disdain from now on toward out-numbered Progressives has to be strongly shown. Long term in perspective, time permitting. Both real and substantial in roles, mutual ambition, and gains. Inner party and progressives have time toward convention to do ironing.
While current thought is as outlined, expectations are low here at present. Nothing's been shown, so far. Pure redo of Obama years is not a WOW! suggestion. It sucks. A link - deets almost always help understandings, especially with four years passing, no improvement, the saga remaining unCHANGED. But barely there voting margins in each house was something even Atlas could not shrug.
FURTHER UPDATE: The Bern is still felt. Keeping a public dialog with Biden cannot fail to aid understandings. A link.