The Fierce Urgency of Now - What it meant then

[FrenchieCat]

On April 4, 1967, exactly one year before his assasination, Martin Luther King, Jr.

Here is a segment of the talk:

MLK's speech:
Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men (sic) do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war.

Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world… we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty… We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak…A few years ago…it seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the poverty programs.

There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war. And I knew 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…I knew that 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…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, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered…True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar.

It comes necessary to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring…A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death…We are now faced with the fact , my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now… We must move past indecision to action.
http://greensborominimumwage.blogspot.com/2007/07/martin-luther-king-jr-fierce-urgency-of.html

[JDPriestly]

1. Thanks for posting this.

Shame on our congressmembers for allowing the war funding bills to be considered separately from those that would fund social programs. Bush should get a choice: pass both the military appropriations and the social program appropriations or neither. This is such a simple concept. Why don't our representatives in Congress get it?

[FrenchieCat]

2. Don't know. It is a shame, though......