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Show Our Man Hoppe Where Will It All End? By ARTHUR HOPPE San Francisco Chronicle The night that Martin Luther King was shot I came home and a young girl, who had been crying, said, "What will happen now?" She asked as though she had been - A I '""" I tlx ' ik waiting for me to bring her the answer. an-swer. Any answer. ans-wer. Any certainty cer-tainty to which to i cling. r And I thought again, as I did when President Kennedy was killed, kill-ed, of those lines What will happen now? Never before had I felt so strongly that I didn't know. Suddenly, this past month, new leaders have risen and, suddenly, old leaders have fallen. Suddenly, there is a glimmer of peace in an endless war. And suddenly, violence, as it always al-ways seems to do, had snuffed out non-violence. "Non-violence," cried a young Negro militant triumphantly that night, "is buried with Martin Luther Luth-er King.' " And suddenly I knew something. I knew he was wrong. I knew that non-violence had no more died with Martin Luther King than it had with Buddha, Christ or Ghandi. We have come a long way toward to-ward non-violence in a million years, this peculiar species of ours. We have dropped our clubs and lost our fangs and renounced cannibalism. cannibal-ism. As the centuries passed we have given up killing each other in the arena for sport. We have abandoned aband-oned the rack, the fiery stake and trial by ordeal. We have come to condemn the sacking of cities, the rape of women captives and the mutilation of the enemy dead. As our capability to kill each other with new weapons has speeded speed-ed up, so has our condemnation of violence kept apace. In a single generation war has lost its glory. In a single generation genera-tion the doctrine that the State should punish the act of killing by killing the killer has come to be widely questioned. After a million years of wallowing wallow-ing in the muck of violence, man seems on the verge of leaping to the stars. What will happen now? I don't know. I don't know whether the young girl will be safe on the streets this summer. Or whether her younger brother will some day kill or die in a far away land. Or who will lead us in the uneasy times to come. But I do know this. Life will go on. The leaves will fall and bud again, the snows will fall and melt again, the rivers will fall and rise again. Life will go on. And as surely as life goes on, so will the day come when no man will kill his fellow man again. It will come because, quite literally, liter-ally, of men like Martin Luther King. This is all I know. It is enough. For it is a certainty. Arthur Hoppe nold: "Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plainSwept with confused alarms of struggle and flightWhere ignorant armies clash by night." "Please," she asked again, "What will happen now?" And I look down into her eyes and said I didn't know. |
