The Giant Triplets of Racism,Materialism, and Militarism

A Radical Revolution
By Martin Luther King, Jr.

( Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke these words in what is considered
his most controversial speech on April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church in
New York City, exactly one year before his assassination. It was not
the first time he had spoken out against the Vietnam War, but it was
the first time he spoke of the 'giant triplets of racism, materialism
and militarism' and linked the war to the Civil Rights Movement.)

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.

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 peoples
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….


These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting
against old systems of exploitation and oppression and out of the
wombs of a frail world new systems of justice and equality are being
born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as
never before. "The people who sat in darkness have seen a great
light." We in the West must support these revolutions. It is a sad
fact that, because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of
communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western
nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the
modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries…. Our only
hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit
and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility
to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we
shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores and thereby
speed the day when "every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain
and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight and
the rough places plain."


A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our
loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation
must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order
to preserve the best in their individual societies. This call for a
worldwide 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…. 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.

Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day. We can
no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of
retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the
ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of
nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of
hate….

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 desperately 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….


Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and
bitter—but beautiful—struggle for a new world. This is the calling of
the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall
we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too
hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate
against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or
will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with
their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The
choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose
in this crucial moment of human history.