Seeking the "hidden" truth takes little searching; it is our open dirty secret. We are not innocent. The myth must be destroyed. The world's children shouldn't have to hide from our predators, electronic and human. To continue to make them do so is to incur a heavy debt of guilt that will continue to mark us as silent accomplices in evil.
Martin King bravely raised his voice and paid with his life. If we want to honor him as we say we do, we should heed his words:
"A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, This way of settling differences is not just. This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples 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 defense than on programs of social up-lift is approaching spiritual death."
Fifty years have elapsed since that warning. The world's children keep hiding from our killing machines, and Americans still turn deaf ears to their cries. We may be spiritually dead now. It seems that way.
Hiding in a North Vietnamese bomb shelter in 1969 while he cradled a little boy in his arms, Fr. Daniel Berrigan, S.J., anti-war rebel priest and poet, wrote the following lines as American bombs sought to kill him and all those he sheltered with in the underworld.
In my arms, fathered
In a moment's grace, the messiah
Of all my tears, I bore reborn
A Hiroshima child from hell.
Can we dead awaken from our silent acquiescence?
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