Of course, the unsanitized MLK, like Bill, loved to 'sleep around'
too.
On Jan 19, 11:54 am, Rick S <[email protected]> wrote:
> So many people remember Martin Luther King Jr. in the sanitized way
> that network television presents him. We are shown excerpts of his "I
> have a Dream" or "Been to the Mountaintop" speeches. But he was also
> an ardent advocate of peace and of ending the war in Vietnam.
>
> One of his best speeches was also one of the most criticized. Time
> magazine and the Washington Post stopped short of calling him a
> traitor to the nation. If their editors were to re-read his speech
> today, they would recognize it as one of the most powerful speeches
> against militarism ever. I believe it is one of his best speeches and
> I wish more peoiple would read it in its entirety. So, for those who
> would like to understand more about the real MLK, I will provide a
> link http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/01/19-13.
>
> For those who do not wish to read a long speech, I will include some
> of my favorite excerpts:
>
> "A time comes when silence is betrayal." That time has come for us in
> relation to Vietnam."
>
> " 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 the 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."
>
> "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 hundreds
> of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent. "
>
> "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 victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy,
> for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our
> brothers."
>
> "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. "
>
> "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 remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may
> cry out deperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf
> to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled
> residue 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 co-annihilation."
>
> Rick S
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