Shed a Little Light
His truth goes marching on!
April 4th. 1967:
"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."
"America, the
richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in
this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish,
to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of
peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to
keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until
we have fashioned it into a brotherhood."
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