They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops.  

They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees.  

They wander into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one "Vietcong"-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them - mostly children.  

They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals.  

They see the children, degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food.  

They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers. 

What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform?  

What do they think as we test our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? 

Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones? 

A true revolution of values 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 to 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 is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.  

A true revolution of values will soon 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 napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into 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 defense 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 this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit 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. 

A Time to Break Silence