Vietnam

The brilliance of Martin Luther King Jr. lives on. I have said before that he was probably the most courageous man of the last century. At least, I have seen no one stand up against such atrocities, with so much passion and committment, since the sixties. Find below, the first paragraph of a speech he made in April 1967. It's ironic, that LBJ had once said he was declaring war on poverty. In turn, he sends all the poor black and white boys off to war. In my view, this was a process of extermination!.........Some ask.....why are Vietnam Veterans so bitter.

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
"Beyond Vietnam,"
From Address delivered to the Clergy and Laymen Concerned
about Vietnam, at Riverside Church

4 April 1967
New York City
There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the poverty program. 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 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. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such. Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. 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. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.