QUOTE FOR THE TIMES
The American Dream (An Excerpt)
By Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr:
Lincoln University, June 6, 1961
"Through our scientific genius, we made of the world a neighborhood, and now through our moral and ethical commitment, we must make of it a brotherhood. We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools. This is what we must learn. It simply means that every nation must be concerned about every other nation; every individual must be concerned about every other individual.
Some months ago, Mrs. King and I journey over to that great country known as India. I never will forget the experience... the experience of talking with and meeting with the great leaders of India, meeting people in the cities and the villages all over that country, a noble and marvelous experience. And I say to you this afternoon, there were those depressing moments. For how can one avoid being depressed, when he sees with his own eyes, millions of people going to bed hungry tonight. How can one avoid being depressed, when he sees with his own eyes, millions of people sleeping on the sidewalks at night. In Calcutta, more than a million people sleep on the sidewalks every night. They have no beds to sleep in; they have no houses to go in. How can one avoid being depressed, when he discovers that out of India's population of 400 million people, more than 365 million make an annual income of less than $60 a year, and most of these people have never seen a doctor or a dentist. As I noticed these conditions, something within me cried out, can we in America stand idly by and not be concerned? And an answer came: Oh no, for the destiny of India and the destiny of every other nation is tied up with the destiny of the United States and the destiny of the United States is tied up with the destiny of India. And I started thinking about the fact that right here in America we spend more than a million dollars a day to store surplus food and I found myself saying, I know where we can store that food free of charge: In the wrinkled stomachs of the hundreds of millions of people who go to be hungry tonight.
Maybe we've spent far too much of our money in the United States establishing military bases around the world rather than bases of genuine concern and understanding. All I'm saying is simply this: that all life is inter-related. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, it affects all indirectly. As long as there is extreme poverty in this world, no man can be totally rich, even if he has a billion dollars. As long as diseases are rampant and millions of people can not expect to live more than 28 or 30 years, no one can be totally healthy, even if he just got a check-up in the finest clinic of the nation. Strangely enough, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way the world is made; this is the inter-related structure of reality.
John Donne thought it years ago and placed it in graphic terms: No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. Then he goes on toward the end to say that any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind, therefore never assume to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. This is the meaning of having a world perspective, if we are to realize the American dream.
Another point is that we must get rid of the notion once and for all that there are superior and inferior races. We must make it clear all over this land and all over the world that a doctrine of white supremacy has no basis in anthropology, has no basis in scientific thinking and has no basis in morality."
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