Lest a Dream Become a Bedtime Story
John Hausdoerffer
January 20, 2004
Western Colorado University
I want to begin by thanking the Black Student Alliance and the Multicultural Center for inviting me to speak tonight—I am honored to have this opportunity. I cannot tell you how much of a welcome sight this gathering is, as we form in community to mourn an individual’s unjust death, to reenact a thinker’s vision for human equality, to remember an historic struggle for social change, and to hope that we can learn from his struggle for what might face us in our times. Too often our communities form around consumption in malls or a common enemy in war, and I find it comforting to know we can form community around a national celebration of revolutionary ideas.
The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. did America and the world an immense service when he challenged the prejudiced assumptions, criticized the racist privileges, and resisted the oppression of his country in order to make it better. The eloquent and inspiring dream that Dr. King posed to 200,000 marchers in 1963, is in fact a challenge to confront a nightmare. The dream is not a naïve utopia, but a call for us to ask critical questions of our society and to form diverse communities that will demand answers. So it would be a disservice to Dr. King and an undue service to his assassination if we, in remembering him, silence those of his views that still challenge us, still push us to become a more just society in the midst of the unjust and illegal wars of our own time, tragically fought in our name.
On this day, when we remember his leadership in protesting the segregation of Montgomery buses and all public facilities in the South, we accept his challenge to create communities of inclusion not ignorance. When we vote thoughtfully and demand that no one be disenfranchised from their right to vote, we accept his challenge to stretch the boundaries of political participation as far as possible. When we reject violence as an option for creating change, we accept Dr. King’s challenge to meet hate with love. When we construct campuses that institutionally encourage diverse voices in the classroom and equal opportunities in society, we accept his challenge. When we demand better working conditions and wages for workers worldwide, regardless of their race or nationality, we remember that he was assassinated while striking with sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. On days like today, when we walk and talk together, we accept his challenge that we practice our constitutional right to peacefully assemble and speak freely. As Dr. King himself said at both ends of his career: we must demand the “right to protest for right”—both in terms of right societies and in terms of the rights granted on paper by our Constitution.
Dr. King showed us that nonviolent resistance against the injustices of society is the deepest form of love for that society. In fact, Dr. King often quoted the Langston Hughes poem stating:
"O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!"
In 2004, in an era when critical questions and nonviolent dissent have been called unpatriotic, it is more important than ever that we learn from Dr. King. It is of dire importance that we let him challenge us, even if it is uncomfortable. So today, I will not read you the important and inspiring words of his “I have a dream” speech. Instead, I will read from his speech “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” given on April 4, 1967 in New York City, a year before his death. “Beyond Vietnam” most comprehensively presents the complexity of his global vision; it is the speech that might push us the farthest in these difficult, yet hopeful, times.
He begins this speech with the following personal note:
"Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: Why are you speaking about war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don't mix, they say. Aren't you hurting the cause of your people, they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live."
If Dr. King felt his fellow clergymen and civil rights leaders did not know him, how can we expect to know and remember him on this day in 2004. While we may be tempted to pick and choose among the most palatable parts of his message, and those parts of his dream which we’ve moved closer towards achieving, I suggest that we know and remember him by considering how he questioned our society, and how he might still question our society today.
In “Beyond Vietnam,” King questioned the war in Vietnam with an intensity controversial even among his supporters.
First, he calls The Vietnam War a war on the poor, because “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.”
Secondly, he saw it as a war on the poor (of all races) because “We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.”
Thirdly, he considers it a war on his principle of nonviolence. After King’s nonviolent successes in desegregating and ensuring voting rights in the South, the challenges of race and poverty in the North became so complicated that some members of his movement began advocating more violent means of resistance. Dr. King states, “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.”
Finally, Dr. King was deeply concerned that “the war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit.” He felt that the war showed not the America Langston Hughes had hoped for, nor the America of its revolutionary principles of rights, freedoms, and justice, but an America of war, racism, and feverish materialism. In order to become the America he wanted, an America that did not exploit and massacre global populations in order to support its materialism, Dr. King called for “a radical revolution in values.”
It is in fact this revolution of values that takes the reader “Beyond Vietnam,” beyond the specific issues of Dr. King’s historic moment in a way that speaks to us in our times. That is, in order to understand Dr. King’s ideal America, we must grasp his revolution of values, we must reflect on whether or not we agree with it, we must ask ourselves the extent to which this revolution has been realized, and we must reflect on the extent to which we as individuals and as a society embrace or reject Martin Luther King’s revolution of values. In a lengthy and powerful passage, he states:
"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. . . 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.’. . . 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.’ . . . 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."
In his conclusion on how this revolution of values can save the soul of America, one cannot help but wonder if Dr. King, who would be only 75 this week, would replace the word “Communism” with the word “Terrorism” in the following paragraph:
"This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. 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 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 those conditions of poverty, insecurity and injustice which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.
He concludes with a call for action, a simple yet revolutionary call for citizens to enact their basic Constitutional rights: Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter -- but beautiful -- struggle for a new world . . . 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."
Our current choices as a society are different from his, but our “moment” is no less “crucial” and carries no fewer consequences for social justice and the American spirit. As I said earlier, Dr. King subtitled his speech “a time to break silence.” Perhaps that is the hardest choice of all: trusting ourselves and forming communities that support us in breaking the many silences we face internally and externally every day.
A final note: I remember, several years ago, being appalled at a TV commercial that borrowed sound bites from Dr. King’s eternally important “I have a dream” speech to sell either cell phones or computers. I have since repressed from memory the name of the actual product, but I could not repress my frustration with their use of the late Martin Luther King as a door-to-door, or TV-to-TV, salesman. I also recall a blimp for a beer company floating above an MLK-day march I attended in Denver in the '90s. If I have anything to give today, beyond my offering of his 1967 speech, it is that we must know him through engaging with his most compelling and uncomfortable ideas on race, equality, poverty, social change, and war; we mustn’t know him through consuming him as a commodity. He fought for justice not commerce. This man, who faced an abundance of death threats, had his home bombed, and sat in jail for his beliefs—all for a justice that many called a hopeless cause—deserves to be remembered by the silences he broke and the ways he can push us to break our own silences in rethinking a better America, especially when such rethinking can be, as he called it, “agonizing” and “beautiful” all at once. When we pick and choose from his legacy to make it too palatable, we run the risk of turning Martin Luther King’s dream into a bedtime story, putting us to sleep during a time in our society when we most need to be awake—during a time of war, exploitive trade, and threats to civil liberties. “Beyond Vietnam” is the wake-up call he posed to us in his final year of life, and we owe it to him to listen and to learn. Thank you for your time.
John Hausdoerffer
January 20, 2004
Western Colorado University
I want to begin by thanking the Black Student Alliance and the Multicultural Center for inviting me to speak tonight—I am honored to have this opportunity. I cannot tell you how much of a welcome sight this gathering is, as we form in community to mourn an individual’s unjust death, to reenact a thinker’s vision for human equality, to remember an historic struggle for social change, and to hope that we can learn from his struggle for what might face us in our times. Too often our communities form around consumption in malls or a common enemy in war, and I find it comforting to know we can form community around a national celebration of revolutionary ideas.
The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. did America and the world an immense service when he challenged the prejudiced assumptions, criticized the racist privileges, and resisted the oppression of his country in order to make it better. The eloquent and inspiring dream that Dr. King posed to 200,000 marchers in 1963, is in fact a challenge to confront a nightmare. The dream is not a naïve utopia, but a call for us to ask critical questions of our society and to form diverse communities that will demand answers. So it would be a disservice to Dr. King and an undue service to his assassination if we, in remembering him, silence those of his views that still challenge us, still push us to become a more just society in the midst of the unjust and illegal wars of our own time, tragically fought in our name.
On this day, when we remember his leadership in protesting the segregation of Montgomery buses and all public facilities in the South, we accept his challenge to create communities of inclusion not ignorance. When we vote thoughtfully and demand that no one be disenfranchised from their right to vote, we accept his challenge to stretch the boundaries of political participation as far as possible. When we reject violence as an option for creating change, we accept Dr. King’s challenge to meet hate with love. When we construct campuses that institutionally encourage diverse voices in the classroom and equal opportunities in society, we accept his challenge. When we demand better working conditions and wages for workers worldwide, regardless of their race or nationality, we remember that he was assassinated while striking with sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. On days like today, when we walk and talk together, we accept his challenge that we practice our constitutional right to peacefully assemble and speak freely. As Dr. King himself said at both ends of his career: we must demand the “right to protest for right”—both in terms of right societies and in terms of the rights granted on paper by our Constitution.
Dr. King showed us that nonviolent resistance against the injustices of society is the deepest form of love for that society. In fact, Dr. King often quoted the Langston Hughes poem stating:
"O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!"
In 2004, in an era when critical questions and nonviolent dissent have been called unpatriotic, it is more important than ever that we learn from Dr. King. It is of dire importance that we let him challenge us, even if it is uncomfortable. So today, I will not read you the important and inspiring words of his “I have a dream” speech. Instead, I will read from his speech “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” given on April 4, 1967 in New York City, a year before his death. “Beyond Vietnam” most comprehensively presents the complexity of his global vision; it is the speech that might push us the farthest in these difficult, yet hopeful, times.
He begins this speech with the following personal note:
"Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: Why are you speaking about war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don't mix, they say. Aren't you hurting the cause of your people, they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live."
If Dr. King felt his fellow clergymen and civil rights leaders did not know him, how can we expect to know and remember him on this day in 2004. While we may be tempted to pick and choose among the most palatable parts of his message, and those parts of his dream which we’ve moved closer towards achieving, I suggest that we know and remember him by considering how he questioned our society, and how he might still question our society today.
In “Beyond Vietnam,” King questioned the war in Vietnam with an intensity controversial even among his supporters.
First, he calls The Vietnam War a war on the poor, because “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.”
Secondly, he saw it as a war on the poor (of all races) because “We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.”
Thirdly, he considers it a war on his principle of nonviolence. After King’s nonviolent successes in desegregating and ensuring voting rights in the South, the challenges of race and poverty in the North became so complicated that some members of his movement began advocating more violent means of resistance. Dr. King states, “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.”
Finally, Dr. King was deeply concerned that “the war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit.” He felt that the war showed not the America Langston Hughes had hoped for, nor the America of its revolutionary principles of rights, freedoms, and justice, but an America of war, racism, and feverish materialism. In order to become the America he wanted, an America that did not exploit and massacre global populations in order to support its materialism, Dr. King called for “a radical revolution in values.”
It is in fact this revolution of values that takes the reader “Beyond Vietnam,” beyond the specific issues of Dr. King’s historic moment in a way that speaks to us in our times. That is, in order to understand Dr. King’s ideal America, we must grasp his revolution of values, we must reflect on whether or not we agree with it, we must ask ourselves the extent to which this revolution has been realized, and we must reflect on the extent to which we as individuals and as a society embrace or reject Martin Luther King’s revolution of values. In a lengthy and powerful passage, he states:
"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. . . 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.’. . . 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.’ . . . 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."
In his conclusion on how this revolution of values can save the soul of America, one cannot help but wonder if Dr. King, who would be only 75 this week, would replace the word “Communism” with the word “Terrorism” in the following paragraph:
"This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. 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 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 those conditions of poverty, insecurity and injustice which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.
He concludes with a call for action, a simple yet revolutionary call for citizens to enact their basic Constitutional rights: Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter -- but beautiful -- struggle for a new world . . . 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."
Our current choices as a society are different from his, but our “moment” is no less “crucial” and carries no fewer consequences for social justice and the American spirit. As I said earlier, Dr. King subtitled his speech “a time to break silence.” Perhaps that is the hardest choice of all: trusting ourselves and forming communities that support us in breaking the many silences we face internally and externally every day.
A final note: I remember, several years ago, being appalled at a TV commercial that borrowed sound bites from Dr. King’s eternally important “I have a dream” speech to sell either cell phones or computers. I have since repressed from memory the name of the actual product, but I could not repress my frustration with their use of the late Martin Luther King as a door-to-door, or TV-to-TV, salesman. I also recall a blimp for a beer company floating above an MLK-day march I attended in Denver in the '90s. If I have anything to give today, beyond my offering of his 1967 speech, it is that we must know him through engaging with his most compelling and uncomfortable ideas on race, equality, poverty, social change, and war; we mustn’t know him through consuming him as a commodity. He fought for justice not commerce. This man, who faced an abundance of death threats, had his home bombed, and sat in jail for his beliefs—all for a justice that many called a hopeless cause—deserves to be remembered by the silences he broke and the ways he can push us to break our own silences in rethinking a better America, especially when such rethinking can be, as he called it, “agonizing” and “beautiful” all at once. When we pick and choose from his legacy to make it too palatable, we run the risk of turning Martin Luther King’s dream into a bedtime story, putting us to sleep during a time in our society when we most need to be awake—during a time of war, exploitive trade, and threats to civil liberties. “Beyond Vietnam” is the wake-up call he posed to us in his final year of life, and we owe it to him to listen and to learn. Thank you for your time.
