Speech by the Rev. William Sloane Coffin

May I simply you know this a time assume that you know that I know that it's a great honor to be it's not happened in Massachusetts that happy I'll let other political lean. And then get right on to the business and maybe you'll forgive me saying that you know that I'm a reverend. If anything my remarks my Judeo-Christian slip is very clearly visible from time to time. Before getting into the future let's deal a bit with the present. After coming back from a very fascinating heartbreaking and heart warming kind of experience in North Vietnam bringing back these three W's cool man is to remain breathtakingly silent and their attorney even though they are against the war very much sell two out of three. I then decided the capitalize on these few brief moments of notoriety and under the auspices of clergy and laity can sign. I want to cross the Middle West in the

Far West for about nine days and talk shells and all kinds of other things. So I felt that I had a pretty good idea. Where a lot of people in the country were also at press conferences. It's very useful in the press of ass to their questions you can always turn around and interview the press and you'll find the press people like the rest of us would rather give answers and ask questions anyhow and the press always knows a great deal. And so you get an awful lot when you ask press people what they think about the situation and the image it kept coming to mind as I want to around the country was the image of this woman in the New Testament who we're told bled bled for 12 years 12 years of slow bleeding and then went to physician after physician and after she had exhausted all that she had she was

worse rather than better. And the reason that that image kept coming to mind was that I kept thinking the country was was was in the slow bleeding. I could almost feel a kind of ebbing heart. I felt that I was kind of debilitation at the very core of America's life. And the so the why we had to be concerned with the bleeding that was going on in Indochina we had also recognized the war's not only murderous but suicidal and we had to be concerned with our own internal bleeding. That's easy of cost and tempting to press the metaphor and talk about the many quack physicians who have attended the body politic of the nation. People like Dr. Kissinger always add to the bleeding has been more bleeding for four years that's basically been his that's a group of us went to see him just after he got to Washington he said come back in five months if we have not stopped this war so we are back in five months and we've been back there often and it's facing the cure is curable bleeding has been more bleeding out of talk about the

morning and who doesn't believe in making house call because the patient is better cured by benign neglect or other talk of that great specialist and heart transplant. Dr. Billy Graham who will replace one selfish heart with an equally selfish one. Save your soul to Dr. Gray and that's about it. Un-Biblical they can be but it's not an uprising because most of the Bible families in this country us fantastically on biblical The better the messages transcend yourself and save the world. And now save yourselves of Billy Graham appealing to our selfish motives to get us to overcome our selfishness and go on to say further more invest now in heavenly bonds it will pay off handsomely on the other side. Or is this. The front of the White House might prefer to say when you cross the last goal line into the great end zone where deserving fans will play forever on God's eternal fire strength but let's not get over enthusiastic about the metaphor. I do think you have to laugh at things that are only in order not to be humiliated

by it. I was born as the real to do the day I forced myself to laugh at everything. Fear of having to cry about it all. More seriously I had the impression that what was wrong there were two basic things wrong with American culture right now let me paint with a broad brush. In the first place we've forgotten that there's any mores unendurable in a culture and so we have a lot of culture to define reality and culture only to define reality and to dictate what the repertoire of our responses to reality will be. In other words there's no trans cultural no trans cultural quality to American culture these days is very legit a little religious dimension which would help because most people in our churches and synagogues churches simply say that the will of God in the welfare of the nation a kind of one in the same.

They don't realize you have reverence for God to have a certain reverence for all manmade institutions including particularly the state. There is no kind of trans cultural philosophic theological biblical quality no extra cultural dimension which would provide a vantage point which to judge the normality of the norm the norms of normality to judge whether the culture is healthy or not healthy you know that might form the culture and criticize it and judge and redeem it in some way. It's a terribly sick thing because cultures and I get a vigil that they don't strive for something higher than themselves they always slip to something below themselves to stay where they are. And the second thing which kept impressing me was a sort of incapacity to come to grips with the negative. It's a funny thing is you look at the book we're talking about this earlier. When you look at the vote in this country and I want to and when people go to the next and they say I were voting for the status quo and yet on the other hand when they put in a Democratic Congress they're saying ever we recognize the status quo doesn't

give us much that. When they go to the next night saying We're for the funding the system but when they put in a Democratic Congress and all those liberal Republican senators they're saying basically we know that the system's not basically very defensible today. But the main problem seemed to be an incapacity. There was no gap no intellectual dry. Now the really deal with what's negative in the world with obviously a beautiful example that they couldn't think feel of the war ought to be ended even though they felt it was endless and probably mindless and heartless the book. We have many evil in this country really to deal with crime let alone rehabilitate criminals. The same is true of drugs and addicts. Our use of the busing issue is to nourish rather than to challenge racial prejudice. We haven't really been able to deal with pollution and you know the gross national product goes up we know that that's not to be equated with an imperial with a superior quality of life.

So this funny strange incapacity to come with to grips with problems is just clamoring for attention. In this sense I think President Nixon is eminently American. He is the sort of cheat victim as well as the champion of the American dream from what do you the White House. There's an escalator. All we have to do is fix our eyes on the stars and off we go. I start early it's true that Americans have usually fixed their eyes on some stars or other historically we have been to high minded people but it's also true I think that historically in our personal and in our corporate lives. We have tended to realize the good the by simply denying the negative repressing what was wrong or pressing what was evil as it is almost as if we

Americans are gifted in engaging in that quack therapy that used to be quite popular when I was a kid in which we were told to say in every way every day in every way I'm getting better and better every day in every way I'm getting better and better every day in every way I'm getting better and better just repressed what ways one might not be getting better and better. Don't look at it. Repress it. We're the only nation in the face of the earth that believes in the power of positive thinking it's a joke in France that Ponce de Botha the only American to come up with something like that so that they hear is. What has happened is that our egos get justifiably identified with our high ideals. So in that respect I think the prize is very American. When he said that one was now two years ago we are the most compassionate and generous nation on the face of the earth. I had the box must the president say it to the Indians and I say to the Chicanos.

And then he went on not only to our own people but the people across the face of the earth and say to the South Vietnamese I don't think he was guilty of the right line. I don't think he was guilty of sanctimonious sanctimonious hypocrisy. To a large degree at least at that moment the president and most of us here were victims of an illusion fostered by an incapacity to deal with the negative or the unions would say with the shadow side of life. The New Yorker which is a very profound theological magazine I think last August and those opening pages I guess it was Janice and shell I think you're right. Most of those opening pages in The New Yorker are all one we put forward our high ideals to hide our self-interested motives put for our high ideals to hide our self-interested moves. We end up by believing in those ideals and then they entrap us

in impossible undertakings and then in order to just the pious selves We point with pride to our own self the steps. As if the purity of our motors somehow offset the brutality of our actions. I think the best book today on the war in Vietnam remains Graham Greene's The Quiet American. Written in 1054 in which Graham Graham Greene concludes innocence should wander the world wearing a leprous bow. Innocents should wander the world wearing a leprous bow. What's doing us in this country is this pretension of innocence and not recognizing that in the sullied dream of human life it is not innocence but holiness. Which is man's only option. So it's safe to me if we're going to get our healing we've got to be willing to

sacrifice our high ideals on the altar of integrity and that we must press for an ethical consciousness that demands a clear sighted awareness of what's going on that is willing to be poor in illusion in order to be written inside. And let me talk for just a minute about this notion of holiness because it does that it does seem to me to be very central to our concerns of the evening on the future of peace. The words whole and Holy have the same root. So I'm talking about holiness I'm talking also about whole ness. Because I think Americans have the blighted themselves so terribly by straining for the good in repressing the evil and not realizing that those who repress the Kumbh themselves. Who themselves are oppressed become themselves repressed. And it's because

we are ourselves so repressed that we become so repressive at home and in the world. I'm very taken by the descriptions of nonviolence as they are set for directly or indirectly by such people as Eric Erickson. Among the young ins. Eric Nyman that psychology and social ethics are something I think that's the right title for people like Thomas Merton who are trying to get us away from the notion of violence being only physical violence. And trying to define nonviolence in such a way so that it will come to mean a refusal to violate human integrity. Non-violent should be a refusal as much as in us lies not the violate human integrity. And starting first of all with ourselves. I think it's true that the modern generation a younger generation is much better

than an older generation in this country. But still most Americans do tend to divide themselves up between what they like about themselves and what they don't like about themselves to identify with what they like about themselves and repress what they don't like about themselves. We're really given two methods of repression when it comes to what we don't like about ourselves. So we put some of the Nile in the place of self-discovery and we put moralistic terrorism in the place of ethical persues instead of bringing on the light of day. Everything about us well. So we're going to examine them with understanding and even with some degree of compassion. We tended to buy after the judge and the judge go through the center you know all the smiles the charism we can bring them. The price of that but the subconscious has no digestive track. So what goes down has to come up again and generally does so in the form of this place the violence how we violate somebody

else's integrity because we don't deal with our own violated integrity. It's the scapegoat psychology for us. And all the generation that is repressed sexuality becomes quite violent toward the Great a permissiveness of the young. Those who repress their ethical natures become violent toward those who make claims on the conscience of police who repress their sexual doubts and are not reassured by what they carry extra on their hip become violent toward Long haired youth with all it suggests is the suggestions of the feminists in which they have come to grips and middle class radical use has in recent years been very violent. Toward middle class parents because they can't quite take leave of the class they wish to put away. Those who are oppressed become themselves repressive.

Freud cut this very nicely when he once said it's a good thing people do not love their neighbors as themselves. If they did they'd kill him. Which is what we've been up to a great deal of the time spiritually and physically. And so it seems to me is Koff for this understanding of wholeness. And it has to start with us as individuals. If we bring out in the light of day all parts of the elect will that which is beautiful which is ugly which is true and that which is false and try and deal with it in some fashion that we that we sacrifice higher ideas on the altars of integrity and come to some rich insight about who we are. Then we won't be as anxious to scapegoat other people. Now what is true of individuals is of course also true of institutions. They

can be outwardly orderly but inwardly violent. And I think we mustn't hesitate to call institutions of violent that in fact violate human integrity. And in this respect Charlie Reiss a book among many other books. Part 1 and 2 Part 3 was a bit euphoric but parts 1 and 2 were very much on the money. When Wright argued that in our country today there is so much malice these internal bleeding if we can go on my metaphor you know because institutional values are the ones that dominate bureaucratic a person thing is more important than the individual growth of those who make up the bureaucracy. Public schools are violent. I've had kids in public schools most public schools in this country I think it's fair to say are quite violent because they violate the integrity of the kid to sit there and this respect the schools are worse than the army the army doesn't ask you to love it.

It just says a bayonet. But on a public school you're expected not only will they do what the teacher says that you're supposed to love the teacher for telling you and the key to you know you lovers and you know that that in Miami on our side and the poor kid gets completely confused. It's like parents in Iowa say to kids you don't want to hit your little brother. He wants to hit his little brother what he wants don't confuse them. You want to hit your little brother but you're not going to be honest about of the real reason. Something like that. But this violation of human integrity by confusing people and the storming their own sense of who they are are really tired. And of course many universities are really vile particularly the graduate student good lawyers graduate students are forced to speak to the world through their footnotes. Some are more and more about less than the last taught in English departments you

know literature and supposed to teach you about life I've actually heard professor say that you know that's violent. I watched a little study here going around the universities a couple years ago and I asked to see all of these that have been submitted for that year for the Ph.D. requirement in English. You couldn't persuade me that those students really wanted to write about that. They were the kind of. Integrity that's going on all over the place in this country and that's why there's such malice. You can find it in every second of the population. You can feel real life and the first intellectual told in public school. Because no wonder they hate intellectuals you know because they've been made to feel that they are the. Smart guys drop out. Why should we run a race designed to make us into lose

this. We keep forgetting that the when somebody at the rat race. Yeah let's get back. Let's get back to what they do all day they're involved in spirit over which they have no say. I have a great friend of very very rich and wonderful man. That's a marvelous combination. The goal as it is rare to pull off. JR when melo Jaramillo runs Cummins engine out in Columbus Indiana among a great many other things and he said to me a couple years ago you know we're about to build a new factory and I said you know we know what's good for the machines I don't know we know what's good for them and. So we made a very careful survey of what was good for them and it was various things that we

found that all kinds of little things like we don't always like to eat in the same damn place in the same sort of pulled on a cafeteria here and have automated stuff there so you can put in your quarter and out comes other things and other places where people want to bring their lunches can sit and then there are a whole slew of guys who had a kind of 20 year poker game going on but they never had a decent table and wish to play poker. Break all kinds A little things as well as the laws you want about whether they wanted music I didn't want music what kind of ventilation lighting all the rest of it and I'll betcha there are not many factory owners in this country who before they make a new factory say what's good for them in the morning. So blue collar worker goes to work in a place and doesn't care that much harmony knows it and its spirit mangling labor and he comes back to what a mortgage payment on the call an overheated teenage daughter a television set a

car smashing pot smoking son. Now the American dream is told your your. Dream isn't that great when he knows damn well in his heart of the American dream of turning one nightmare party. But because nobody has had the courage and compassion to say don't look like Willie Loman you got the whole dream and you're being violated left right and center and until you face it of course you're going to go on and scapegoat the long haired kid while the liberal press as of yet con of the UN you name it. Blacks know what violation is all about because. They're healthier along with the women who also have a very keen sense these days and this I must say was very encouraging. All the small communities in America the women seem to be really coming alive. To say not only the women but hopefully as men. For them and how we've been violated. Now we're told it's got a machismo you know the big thing you know

the president leads us with this kind of sophomoric football syndrome you know you've got to be tough now. Well I want to on the way to you know the other day and I suggested and I said why don't you women men you know Cape Canaveral the pickling operation yes. Go Ahead boys out there you know you got to be conservative in the sense that we're going to conserve the life that we brought into this and we're going to make human things first human things human and we're going to say they're the most important thing we violate everybody is at their integrity violated. So this internal bleeding.

We voted for another four more years of slow bleed. I think if we take that kind of approach to the peace movement the movement for integrity a movement for the whole earth has a great deal to offer the country an infinite variety of ways. And I've seen more and more recent years how all these things that intimately related foreign policy and domestic policy personal life and public life all these things are elated that if you deal with this question. A few min integrity at any point the ripples will probably spread much further and you can see. So I think it is a very broad approach which is call for domestically in the peace movement. Now when it comes to the foreign issues

it seems to me that there are some things that we can also. See along this line. Certainly we have violated the integrity of the Vietnamese. No question about that. All in a funny way you know. They're better off in North Vietnam than we are here. I'll ask you once the men don't fight against evil a fight against the annihilation by evil North Vietnamese have that fight and annihilation by evil. But they're really put together all this suffering is coming to them from the outside they're not torn up with and they don't feel guilty they don't feel frustrated. They are the little people fighting off that loveless power up there the spirit of 1776 that communism emanates from their nationalism. And they've been fighting Mongo I heard more about Mongol the mind they are about Mongols all my life. They've been buying modeling fighting the Chinese they've been fighting the French the Japanese and all the Americans and they know that the foreign aggressor eventually wearies and independence and reunification will one day be there and they fight with the serenity of those who

hold a future in their hands. Remember. When one of us really violated confused pilots was standing in the ruins of the fog and believe me we have gone four churches in a big way in a big way 400 in the fight them cathedral is the most beautiful and impressive I'm all for 30 years the bill the eastern and western architecture beautifully combined. Surrounded by rice fields you could do that. And we destroyed it completely on Ascension Sunday yet August 15th with great fun the bombing we had a whole slew of charts on that so I really could not is that some Southern Baptist bigot you know Weiner out there in a private bank that are his own you know every one of those Roman Catholic churches he could. But at least their flight you see virtually is it has greater integrity to what they are whole.

The culture on earth is not on raveling at all the way it is in the south its whole whereas our cultures were all torn up inside while this pilot. And this pilot was standing in the ruins of the wrong he's asked for a comment that he made up. He said this is a real shame but I'm sure you fellows will build a better one. And I said to the provincial chief there was well as I said I like that. How can you go on you know being as hospitable and friendly as you are. To the victim must always be generous to the vanquished. Think of all things very loud. He was all mixed up you know. Guilty not guilty didn't know how to handle it you know they still don't know how to handle it these poor pilot platic. Pathetically in the background for taking on a part in the psychological moral context in which to put what they've done. But these guys up there were really put together and really put together which is not to say they don't apply a problem but I think most of my head I'm.

Also in my head. Now we have violated the cost integrity of Vietnam and we are violating integrity. A lot of small nations around the world. There's no question about it. We're doing it through obvious means through a corporate structure. And we're doing it through less obvious means even enough foreign aid because giving without receiving is a downward motion. It's high time we corrected that. Let's think big for a while. In that long overdue and then the time long past and we should have an international income tax. Which would be a much more equitable way and a much less patronizing debilitating way for us to deal one with another and it's probably true the richer nations are getting richer the poor nations are getting poorer. And according to many prophets. It is probably true that those tribes in a small way to

stop a genocidal war in Indochina may unless things change drastically confidently expect to see in the 1980s throughout the Third World small pockets of famine spreading gradually in a veritable seas of hunger. For centuries. And we can sit back in our living rooms and watch Ivan and living come up right before our eyes. National Income Tax Credit. Think about petitioning Congress to pass legislation that would allow us to get. Picked up in other countries.

In the same way the private in the United States. Would take the burden off the government. I don't know if that's a realistic way to go about it but that's one small way. It seems to me that we could start to be thinking of national income tax. Clearly also we've got to. And I think this is much easier to get after that notion of an international army small standing in a national army. For almost 10 years ago now signed by all kinds of. Respectable people like Cyrus Brewster Jr. and I forget who all calling for a small.

Basic recognition was the United States and the Soviet Union have passed. From isolationism and nationalism. And make sure that everything obviously a kind of justification. When it comes and it would begin to chip away at that absolute national sovereignty which each one of the national power. It's incredible when you think about it the whole planet because we don't think about the planet in the right way the planet is basically a space ship. That electrically speaking is no larger.

Circle of troll. And provincial parochial outmoded notion. Remember a Latin American diplomat at the U.N. saying several years ago around here that things tend to disappear. It's a small conflict and we deal with it then the conflict disappears with a small conflict between two small nations and the conflict disappears or the conflict between a small nation a large nation and a small nation disappears. It's a conflict between two large nations in the UN disappear. Well I don't know that the U.N. is finalized so I don't know whether it's got the muscle it just needs to exercise it or whether it's a hopeless organization but these are things we've got to think about having a small international on an international income tax. These are some of the larger some of the more immediate want to

do. You may have noted that one that dumb that smart bomb. Did that dumb thing in North Vietnam and destroyed the French embassy. The number one man. Who tragically died. Just because one freshman died we didn't bomb Hanoi. Now tell me this war isn't racist or isn't it big power. Doesn't have big power considerations. But you may have noticed he wasn't the ambassador. The reason he was in the ambassador is because the French have never paid out what they promised. But I bought all of us other north and made it very clear about these things. When this agreement gets signed. And I am as they say cautiously optimistic that it's going to be signed in the next couple of weeks ago for the first time I really feel we may really be

on the brink of signing an agreement if we don't suddenly decide to defend. If you go along with all his demands on the pieces off in the war zone. But if we do sign the agreement it calls for operation. It is important that we give reparations. It's important we get an ambassador and I very quickly and it's going to be up to pismo when I think see to it that we pay off what we promise. We made a big thing in American history about everybody pays their debt their war debt will have somewhat it's now it's going to be our turn to pay and we have to make sure that everybody's desire to forget about the whole thing doesn't get gratified at the expense of what we owe. Now what do you do in the private sector. How are we going to show that I think from all about the North Vietnamese how we're going to show them that

we never wanted them to become enemies. See there's a marvelous relationship between the North Vietnamese and the anti war America and the Americans are bombing you know. Anything you hear about Honeywell you can count on it. It's not enough. Honeywell doesn't waive any personal bond. Simply not to be believed. These are all these victims got perforated by these little square pellets a shrike missile has 10000 of these on any military. These are any economic they can bridge I gather things to a role they get their rare road you know they're just they're deliberately kill the civilian population demoralized. Oh well. Nothing. You can find out everything they make. But the North Vietnamese will want to ensure the Americans are bombing them.

But on the other hand they're these little people in America. Who are. Allies with the little people of North Vietnam against this great loveless power and they have an extraordinary kind of relationship with the people. And furthermore it seems to relate to America as a whole they make this distinction which is far more generous than is accurate given our representative form of government the government the American people. This follows the socialist ideology which set forth with the French government that was a for the French people and the French people behave much better than they do over here all of which is true about American still by and large although we don't behave terribly well to us. But anyhow they make that the government the American people. And furthermore they have a great love for the American people basic. Because after all the American people were the first Colonials horizon right the sack of wholemeal oppression. They know the Declaration of Independence. Kids memorize a part of it incorporating the poor 1945 Declaration of Independence.

I can understand you know why we're not on this side. It's kind of complicated explaining how the descendants of Thomas Jefferson make like George the Third. That's a way of revolutions isn't. There to be some way you know that we can do something in a small way to sort of say that's the way we feel and this isn't giving without receiving this is just giving is a very small token. Of how we feel.