"Beyond Vietnam," 1967
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 Latin 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 hands 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 veins of people 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.
Only for his christianity and being against racism is that he is regarded as a hero for many people in the USA. Malcom X? a muslim separatist. Bayard Rustin? A gay (or "who was this?") And MLK is remembered and glorified... if his criticism of war and his support of socialist policies were more well known, probably there wouldn't even be a MLK memorial day.
ReplyDeletePs: I have a facebook friend who always writes about Bayard Rustin, and by the little I know about him, he seems quite interesting.