Rothko Chapel - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Sound Installation

Source: rothkochapel.org

I came around the corner of the Rothko Chapel in Houston by way of the meditation park that abuts the chapel. From speakers set up outside, I could hear the beginning of Dr. King’s address Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence, delivered April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in New York City. You can download a pdf from the Civil Rights Archive here.

Visiting the chapel is always a balm for me. Today was especially necessary. Every year, I give some thought over to and meditate on Dr. King’s lessons and example. Today, however, was more of the moment. Today, Dr. King’s words are more necessary than ever and his address on U.S. involvement in Vietnam may hold more relevance for us than ever. He touches on aspects of, not just America’s disastrous, imperialist foreign policy, but something more innate to the nation. 

He found “[t]he war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit” and what followed was a list of elements and effects of the nation’s arrogance and hubris.

During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which now has justified the presence of U.S. military "advisors" in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counter- revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and why American napalm and green beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. It is with such activity in mind 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."

The emphasis is in the source document. In what follows, the emphasis is mine. Dr. King speaks directly to us and we would do well to heed his words.

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 investment.

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 "personoriented" 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. 

Let that sink in and marinate for awhile.

Dr. King found himself castigated for expanding his outlook beyond domestic civil rights and for speaking up for the oppressed around the world. He found himself under deeper scrutiny for having the temerity to call out the United States of America’s interventions around the world. When he began speaking about issues of America’s policies beyond Vietnam, to other regions of the world where meddling in elections and gaming the directions of governments through various forms of coercion (including but not limited to propping up dictators, assassinations, and of course, military intervention), he kicked a veritable hornets nest. 

It’s one thing to promote equality and civil rights in the Land of the Free and it’s entirely possible that he was allowed to do so because, sure, “racism’s bad and we might gain from changing from our image”, even though, of course, racism is in the roots of the founding of this country. But when he began questioning the other deeply rooted malaise at the heart of American darkness, that was a bridge too far for some. Emphasis is mine again.

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 is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which

produces beggars needs restructuring. 

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.

I fear that Dr. King would be dismayed at the current state of affairs. We now live in an oligarchy that will produce more beggars; we already have individual capitalists investing huge sums around the world who care not a whit for whom they hurt or disenfranchise. And today, on Dr. King’s birthday, a figure was inaugurated to the highest office of the land who, along with his allies will continue “injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane.” We have annually increased out military budget to obscene proportions, far more “than on programs of social uplift.” The nation is well on the road to its spiritual death.

Bearing in mind that this speech was delivered at a time when some extreme voices on the right were calling for the U.S. to withdraw from the United Nations, it doesn’t take much to switch out NATO for the UN. In what follows, the focus on the People’s Republic of China came at a time when communism was seen as a very real threat. That said, there’s more of relevance to be found.

Let us not join those who shout war and through their misguided passions urge the United States to relinquish its 

participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We 

must not call everyone a Communist or an appeaser who advocates the seating of Red China in the United Nations 

and who recognizes that hate and hysteria are not the final answers to the problem of these turbulent days. We must not engage in a negative anti-communism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest

defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to

remove thosse conditions of poverty, insecurity and injustice which are the fertile soil in which the seed of

communism grows and develops. 

As much as he might have been speaking about relations with communist China, it is of the moment to turn these words inward, since we as a nation are so poor in spirit when it comes to introspection and honest self-appraisal. The seeds of democracy’s demise is not coming from without. That said, the most difficult part of all this is Dr. King’s call for “wise restraint and calm reasonableness.” We may see the ruling classes as too powerful to respond to any such restraint or reasonableness, but now, as then, to give into acts of violence against the power holders would be catastrophic. I speak not just from some quasi-battle strategy - i.e., that the state is now far more militarily powerful and wouldn’t hesitate to visit full violence upon citizens it deems enemies - but that we don’t want to let the same anger and hatred that has corroded so many of our fellow Americans to infect us, as well. Healing won’t come through the exacerbation of hatred. It won’t. We know this. I’ll have more to say on this in the days to come.

In what followed, Dr. King reiterated the necessity for loving all. The context was certainly more as a scourge for our foreign policy, but - and I think I’m right in this - he would have abjured us to exercise that same necessity to one another here, domestically. For Dr. King, love was the foundation of the non-violence that would lead to peaceful co-existnece and away from mutually assured destruction. Again, though, if we apply this to our present moment, his words remain urgent.

This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class and nation

is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men. This oft misunderstood and

misinterpreted concept…has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality.

This Hindu-Moslem-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first

epistle of Saint John:

Let us love one another; for love is God and everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that

loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. If we love one another God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected

in us.

We don’t have to be theists to simply state that love is all that we’ve got that will get us through some very dark times. We will certainly have other tools; intelligence, organization, and so on. But we need to operate from a base of clarity and compassion, and more than mere strategic or legalistic knowledge, we will need wisdom to ensure that what we do is the right thing.

Even if the more benighted among us come after us and assail us with the worst they can think or do, and even if we must needs defend ourselves, let it be with the sense of non-harm and if it must be physical, that it comes from a place of minimizing the potential for pain. Dr. King would disagree with me, I’m sure, and I wouldn’t argue with him, but when too many people own guns and are motivated by anger or hatred at their fellow Americans, I’m not sure I could turn the other cheek as he and the Christ abjured us to do. I would like to think I have the skill to diffuse a tense situation - I’ve done so before, so I think I can speak confidently; but until or unless it happens, I’m not certain how I would respond to violence upon my or another’s person.

To be sure, he would want us to take steps to minimize the impact of policies and legislation that threaten to rend the fabric of civil society and plunge us back, not just decades but by more than a century, when the Gilded Age was in full swing and wealth disparity was far worse than now. He would not, I think, be soft on indecision or sitting on our hands to help one another through this time. Indeed, his words on this matter are clear.

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 thethief 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." 

Of course, there’s so much more to take away from this address and I highly recommend reading it in full and more, listening to the man himself delivering it. Mostly, though, I hope that we can all internalize its lessons and grow in a true grace of loving and caring for one another.

Additional Reading

King, Jr., Dr. Martin Luther.Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence. Civil Rights Archive. https://www.crmvet.org/info/mlk_viet.pdf. Retrieved 20 January 2025.