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| Saturday, 14 February 2004 |
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A Revolution of Values (This excerpt from a speech by Martin Luther King at Riverside Church, New York in 1967, though directly applicable to the US, is very relevant to our situation in Sri Lanka today). 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 motive 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 value 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 upon 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 in more than flinging a coin to beggar, it is not haphazard and superficial.
It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs re-structuring. A true revolution of values will 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 napalam, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hatred into the 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 defence 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 the revolution of values. There is nothing, except a death wish, to prevent us from re-ordering our priorities, so that the purpose of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from moulding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood. |
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