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Here's a relevant excerpt. The entire speech is well worth listening too, or at least reading the transcript.
(snip)
I believe that we may march and we may show our numbers in great volume from time to time. We do that. Women marching on Washington in large numbers. Peace activists turning out occasionally to demonstrate their passions of peace. These things go on and we see them. But what we don't seem to understand is that we have not yet, in some profound and meaningful way, interrupted the way in which the enemy does business. early on, I was introduced to a song in my youth and I was aspiring to find my place in the world as an artist. I remember a song that said calculate carefully and ponder it well and remember this when you do, "My two hands are mine to sell a major machine and they can stop them, too." It is -- it is the stopping of the machine that we seem to falter. For some reason we have not understood clearly what the blueprint was when we recall and think about what happened in the Civil Rights Movement and the Labor Movement and the Women's Movement in its early manifestations. The one thing that all those movements had in common was that they stopped the machine. And until we stop the machine, and in the way in which they -- they hungryly pursue profit, until we tell them you will not turn another moment of profit until you deal with our spiritual bankruptcy as a nation , until you find a new codes of honor in which to deal with the world, we will not tolerate any longer your banks, your institutions, we'll no longer tolerate your military interventions and your military impositions. and we are ready to put our bodies and our lives on the line to do that. It was Rosa Parks and what happened in Montgomery, Alabama, and the fact that people picketted and refused to let the machine, the profit punks easily. That we found our earliest victories and as we escalated our movement and we escalated our targets, we found more and more those who sat in the places of power troubled by the fact that we had the power to disrupt their machines and to stop them. And I think what we must do, as we pursue institutionnally an organization, we have goals that we have set for ourselves, is for us to collectively picket that time and that moment when not for a day, not for a moment, not for a march just to demonstrate that we exist, but to use our might and our powers strategically to make sure that nothing functions, nothing runs, nothing works until we find a way to end poverty and we find a way to end racism, until we come to the table and agree to do that.
(snip)
How do we stop their machine? And there are times when we would speak about doing it violently. It was romantic to think that we could grab an M5 or M6 as we go up in the mountains somewhere and have a shoot-out and make our mark and to have the freedom. There was a time, perhaps, when that could be done. Certainly in Africa, the periods and the struggle against colonialism. All the up risings and the rebellions in Algeria and Vietnam and all those places were about. Soldiers and men and women taking to the streets and the villages of mountains, hamlets, abusing weaponry, the violence to meet violence. So now we come to know that that's not possible. It doesn't work. Certainly a gift that has been given us demonstrates for us that we have the most powerful weapon of all -- and it's at our disposal and it's ours for the taking. It's called NONVIOLENCE.
(snip)
I have to tell you that most of the places that I go to in the world are looking more like San Francisco and the Bay Area every day. (note: He was speaking in San Francisco) They are people -- in Germany, in France, in Ireland -- England and Ireland and Poland, many places where I go whose voices are being heard mightily in their rebellion against the American Policy. Because the policies of oppression are speaking out and speaking out loudly. They're transforming their government. They're changing their leaders in Spain and where Brazil and Argentina and Nicaragua, in Venezuela, in many places and we must and can do the same here. We must just understand that the sacrifice we have yet to make is demanded of us. Somebody is going to have to, in cleaning up the air, talk about not driving anymore. Somebody, in trying to get a better price for good, is going to have to say that we just can't keep running after the fast food market. Somebody is going to have to make a sacrifice. Somebody is going to have to put their body in front of the machine. Somebody is going to have to die. It's the way things are. It's the way things have been. And we, in our efforts to try to change and make a better world, will have to pay a price. Truth is -- we must ask ourselves, are we willing to go all the way? Ask yourself if you are truly willing to die for what you believe and you might come up with an answer that will explain to you why we haven't quite moved as far ahead as we should be moving. What are we prepared to give? What are we prepared to do? And should it be any less than those who have gone before us and who are willing to pay the price?
(more)
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/15/1410245
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