The Days to Come
“The days to come” is the last chapter of King’s grouping of essays “Why we can’t wait?”. In this chapter, King projects his ambitions for the Civil Right Movement, that includes a greater political role for African-Americans, a new way to bring everyone out of poverty. But how does King conclude his essay?
In this extract of MLK’s closing of “Why we can’t wait?”, King emphasizes on world peace. He starts by saying: “the greatest contribution may be in the area of world peace”. This sets the reader in MLK’s perspective and tells us what he is going to talk about. After that, he says that peace is a result of nonviolence.
He later adds that sadly a very few practitioners of nonviolent actions are committed to its philosophy. King criticizes indirectly the MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) theory, where nations develop their nuclear power just to secure that they won’t get attacked. This theory is a paradox because the political agreements won’t safeguard the lives of a certain country’s inhabitants against this fatal death.
It can be noted that King uses a multiple of figures of speech throughout his writing. For example, King uses the butterfly effect, which consists of presenting a small action that causes a bigger one. We can see this in the third paragraph: “Sooner or later all the peoples of the world, without regard to the political systems under which they live, will have to discover a way to live together in peace. … He became endowed with a conscience”.
King later describes human evolution, especially concerning cannibalism. He says that the violence that the black community has received is as abhorrent as eating another’s flesh. This is mentioned in the Holy books such as the Bible and the Quran.
Lastly, we can deduce by the essay’s ending that MLK started local, and finished global. In other words, King started by finding a solution to Negroes’ needs, and later on, he started generalizing problems of very specific people to a problem that the whole world is suffering from. To justify my point, King last sentence of this grouping was “Nonviolence, the answer to the Negroes’ need, may become the answer to the most desperate need of all humanity”
In conclusion, I agree with MLK’s actions for multiple reasons. King stopped the injustice that Negroes were suffering at the time, but also thought about a theory that allows all human beings to live together in peace.
