As of last week, the com­bi­na­tion of evi­dence we observe con­tin­ues to be asso­ci­ated with strong reces­sion risk and the like­li­hood of a "whip­saw trap" in the stock mar­ket. We'll respond to new data as it changes, but I expect that the pri­mary win­dow of inter­est here is about 6–8 weeks. In the event that eco­nomic data can pro­duce fairly upbeat read­ings over that hori­zon, and the S&P 500 can remain at or about present lev­els, our esti­mate of oncom­ing reces­sion risk would back off fairly quickly. Presently, that out­come would be out­side of the norm based on the lead­ing eco­nomic mea­sures we track, as well as the over­val­ued, over­bought, over­bull­ish con­di­tion of the stock market.

I want to empha­size again that I am nei­ther a cheer­leader for reces­sion, nor a table-pounder for reces­sion. It's just that given the data that we presently observe, an oncom­ing reces­sion remains the most prob­a­ble out­come. When unseen states of the world have to be inferred from imper­fect and noisy observ­able data, there are a few choices when the evi­dence isn't 100%. You can either choose a side and pound the table, or you can become com­fort­able dwelling in uncer­tainty, and take a posi­tion in pro­por­tion to the evi­dence, and the extent to which each pos­si­ble out­come would affect you.

With most ana­lysts dis­miss­ing the like­li­hood of reces­sion, I have been vocal about ongo­ing reces­sion con­cerns not because I want to align myself with one side, but because the invest­ment impli­ca­tions are very asym­met­ric. A slow but steady stream of mod­estly good eco­nomic news is largely priced in by investors, but a reces­sion and the accom­pa­ny­ing earn­ings dis­ap­point­ments would destroy some crit­i­cal pil­lars of hope that investors are rely­ing on to sup­port already rich val­u­a­tions. We're always open to shift­ing our invest­ment stance and out­look in response to new evi­dence, but the "opti­mistic" evi­dence that many observers are using to dis­card reces­sion con­cerns is gen­er­ally based on coin­ci­dent or lag­ging data.

In the past cou­ple of weeks, we've seen few arti­cles pre­sent­ing var­i­ous oppos­ing views to our (and ECRI's) reces­sion con­cerns. A few of these are about as valu­able as what you might fish out of a Cracker Jack box, focus­ing on the Con­fer­ence Board LEI (despite its heavy reliance on real M2, which even the Con­fer­ence Board has decided to dis­card begin­ning with the next report), or fram­ing the ECRI's view as if it is dri­ven only by the weekly lead­ing index. Another arti­cle presents an index that does in fact turn down dur­ing reces­sions, but with vary­ing lead and lag times, and incon­sis­tent thresh­olds, so there's no way to define a use­ful sig­nal except with hindsight.

While I am con­vinced that the data weigh heav­ily toward reces­sion risk, there is a well-done and more opti­mistic piece by Dwaine van Vuuren out of South Africa that is worth read­ing, par­tic­u­larly for method­olog­i­cal rea­sons. I appre­ci­ate van Vuuren's approach because the invest­ment world des­per­ately needs more ana­lysts who thought­fully exam­ine long-term data rather than using toy mod­els or toss­ing opin­ions off the top of their heads. He con­structs a super-composite of nine eco­nomic indices, not­ing that one can only "safely pro­claim" reces­sion when the major­ity of those has turned neg­a­tive. I agree with that obser­va­tion, but that's mainly because the par­tic­u­lar mea­sures included in the com­pos­ite (such as the ISM, Chicago Fed and Philly Fed indices) are largely coin­ci­dent, very short-leading, or short-lagging. Even if one alters the weights on these, it is very dif­fi­cult to cre­ate lead­ing indi­ca­tors out of coin­ci­dent ones. My impres­sion is that the impli­ca­tions of that super-composite are likely to shift in fairly short order, pos­si­bly as soon as the Con­fer­ence Board intro­duces its new ver­sion of the LEI, so it will be inter­est­ing to see how these mea­sures evolve in the next cou­ple of months.

On a sta­tis­ti­cal note, the fact that only a few of the indices in the super-composite are cur­rently in reces­sion ter­ri­tory doesn't trans­late well into the con­clu­sion that reces­sion risk is low*, because of that dis­tinc­tion between lead­ing and coin­ci­dent indi­ca­tors. For investors, this is a par­tic­u­larly impor­tant issue. The stock mar­ket itself is a short-leading indi­ca­tor of reces­sion, so from an investor's stand­point, coin­ci­dent or short-lagging reces­sion indi­ca­tors are not as use­ful as one would wish. By the time it's safe to pro­claim a reces­sion and close the barn door, the horses are already out. This is why investors have to be very sen­si­tive to early mea­sures of reces­sion risk.

[*Geek's note: There's lim­ited infor­ma­tion from run­ning a logit model using "reces­sion 4 months from now" as the depen­dent vari­able, if the inde­pen­dent vari­ables gen­er­ally don't lead at that hori­zon. Also, there's risk in fit­ting a mul­ti­vari­ate logit or pro­bit model with ordi­nary vari­ables rather than binary flags, because your out­put will gen­er­ally be very sen­si­tive to the exact covari­ance struc­ture of the data, so a model that fits almost per­fectly in train­ing data will typ­i­cally dete­ri­o­rate rather quickly in out-of-sample data. The other prob­lem with con­tin­u­ous val­ues in prob­a­bil­ity mod­els is that when you use them in uni­vari­ate logit/probit esti­ma­tions, the model amounts to a thresh­old fil­ter that is highly non­lin­ear around a sin­gle value, pro­duc­ing prob­a­bil­ity esti­mates that clus­ter either at zero or 100%, with abrupt leaps in-between. The prac­ti­cal dif­fi­culty is that this can send your sig­nal from about zero chance of reces­sion to near-certainty of reces­sion with the addi­tion of just one or two slightly weaker data points.]

Cap­tur­ing a syndrome

Reces­sion evi­dence is best mea­sured by cap­tur­ing a syn­drome of con­di­tions that reflects broad dete­ri­o­ra­tion in both real activ­ity and finan­cial indi­ca­tors. What's per­plex­ing to me is that the reces­sion con­cerns we're see­ing are evi­dent even in com­pos­ites of very widely tracked economically-sensitive indi­ca­tors. For exam­ple, the chart below is sim­ply the aver­age of stan­dard­ized val­ues (mean zero, unit vari­ance) of the fol­low­ing vari­ables: 6 month change in S&P 500, 6 month change in non­farm pay­rolls, 12 month change in non­farm pay­rolls, 6 month change in aver­age weekly hours worked, ISM Pur­chas­ing Man­agers Index, ISM New Orders Index, OECD Lead­ing Indi­ca­tor — total world, OECD Lead­ing Indi­ca­tor — US, ECRI Weekly Lead­ing Index growth, Chicago Fed National Activ­ity Index — 3 month aver­age, credit spreads (Baa vs 10-year Trea­sury), Indus­trial com­mod­ity prices — 12 month and 6 month change, and New build­ing per­mits 6 month change.

The cur­rent aver­age is at lev­els that have always and only been asso­ci­ated with reces­sion (and at about the same level where most reces­sions have started), though there was a brief dip nearly approach­ing these lev­els in 2002, just after the 2000–2001 recession.

While we pre­fer to con­struct dis­crim­i­na­tor vari­ables (sim­i­lar to our Reces­sion Warn­ing Com­pos­ite , which helps to cap­ture inter­ac­tions and min­i­mize "out­lier" effects), we should be reluc­tant to casu­ally dis­miss the down­turn we observe in a whole range of eco­nomic mea­sures here.

Of course, it's pos­si­ble that the down­turn we've observed to date will quickly reverse to a new growth path, but we should keep in mind that GDP is just the sum of con­sump­tion, real invest­ment, gov­ern­ment spend­ing, and net exports, and then ask what will drive that rever­sal. Have the credit strains in Europe been durably addressed? Can Euro­pean economies presently be expected to expand? Is there now less need for fis­cal restraint in the U.S.? Has the over­hang of trou­bled mort­gages in the finan­cial sys­tem been worked out? Have sav­ings rates rebounded or pres­sure on house­hold bud­gets eased? Is con­sumer demand is sus­tain­ably rebound­ing? Is there pent-up demand for cap­i­tal goods despite hav­ing drawn spend­ing for­ward due to expir­ing tax cred­its last year? Are exports to the rest of the world expected to accel­er­ate? Are profit mar­gins likely to expand from already record lev­els in order to accom­mo­date growth in cor­po­rate prof­its? Do com­pa­nies expect demand to be strong enough to com­mit to large-scale or multi-year invest­ment projects? Not all of these fac­tors have to reverse in order to have a sus­tained expan­sion, but the head­winds don't appear light.

My intent isn't to go to bat­tle on the reces­sion side of this debate, but rather to share what I'm look­ing at, and the con­cerns I have about con­tin­u­ing eco­nomic risks — par­tic­u­larly since the impli­ca­tions for the stock mar­ket are lop­sided. If we are des­tined to have a reces­sion, I would pre­fer for us to cor­rectly antic­i­pate it, but I don't hope for one, and my pref­er­ence would be not to observe the kind of data we're see­ing here at all. Rather than over­stat­ing the case or dis­miss­ing the risks, we're will­ing to dwell in uncer­tainty by act­ing in pro­por­tion to the data we observe and its impli­ca­tions for the finan­cial mar­kets. At present, the data strongly implies reces­sion risk, though with less than 100% cer­tainty. The prob­lem is that with over­val­ued, over­bought, over­bull­ish mar­ket con­di­tions, the loss impli­ca­tions for the mar­ket in the event of a blind­side reces­sion are far more hos­tile than the pos­si­ble gains in the event of a recov­ery that is already anticipated.

Mar­ket Climate

As of last week, the Mar­ket Cli­mate for stocks was char­ac­ter­ized by a con­tin­ued neg­a­tive return/risk pro­file, hold­ing Strate­gic Growth and Strate­gic Inter­na­tional to a tightly defen­sive posi­tion. As noted above, we are open to a more con­struc­tive shift in our invest­ment posi­tion par­tic­u­larly if eco­nomic data and mar­ket inter­nals can hold to rea­son­ably upbeat lev­els over the next 6–8 weeks, but this would be an unusual out­come given the cur­rent con­di­tion of the data, so we'll eval­u­ate the evi­dence as it arrives. In bonds, we con­tinue to see pres­sures that give a down­ward bias to inter­est rates, but those rates are already suf­fi­ciently depressed that short yield spikes can eas­ily wipe out weeks of mod­est gains, as well as a year or more of yield. For that rea­son, Strate­gic Total Return con­tin­ues to carry an aver­age dura­tion of about 3–4 years. The Fund also has about 12% of assets in pre­cious met­als shares, where our over­all return/risk esti­mates remain very pos­i­tive, but volatil­ity could be high in the event that eco­nomic expec­ta­tions shift abruptly, lead­ing us to take a con­struc­tive but mod­er­ate posi­tion in that market.

—

In honor and remem­brance of Dr. Mar­tin Luther King, Jr.

There's no way to con­dense Dr. King's insights into a few quo­ta­tions, or to embrace his wis­dom through one or two speeches. But he said that he tried to speak on one par­tic­u­lar topic at least once a year, so this seems to be a good place to start.

Lov­ing Your Ene­mies
Novem­ber 17 1957

- I want to use as a sub­ject from which to preach this morn­ing a very famil­iar sub­ject, and it is famil­iar to you because I have preached from this sub­ject twice before to my know­ing in this pul­pit. I try to make it a, some­thing of a cus­tom or tra­di­tion to preach from this pas­sage of Scrip­ture at least once a year, adding new insights that I develop along the way out of new expe­ri­ences as I give these mes­sages. Although the con­tent is, the basic con­tent is the same, new insights and new expe­ri­ences nat­u­rally make for new illustrations.

- So I want to turn your atten­tion to this sub­ject: "Lov­ing Your Ene­mies." It's so basic to me because it is a part of my basic philo­soph­i­cal and the­o­log­i­cal ori­en­ta­tion– the whole idea of love, the whole phi­los­o­phy of love. In the fifth chap­ter of the gospel as recorded by Saint Matthew, we read these very arrest­ing words flow­ing from the lips of our Lord and Mas­ter: "Ye have heard that it has been said, — Thou shall love thy neigh­bor, and hate thine enemy.' But I say unto you, Love your ene­mies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despite­fully use you; that ye may be the chil­dren of your Father which is in heaven."

- Over the cen­turies, many per­sons have argued that this is an extremely dif­fi­cult com­mand. Many would go so far as to say that it just isn't pos­si­ble to move out into the actual prac­tice of this glo­ri­ous com­mand. But far from being an imprac­ti­cal ide­al­ist, Jesus has become the prac­ti­cal real­ist. The words of this text glit­ter in our eyes with a new urgency. Far from being the pious injunc­tion of a utopian dreamer, this com­mand is an absolute neces­sity for the sur­vival of our civ­i­liza­tion. Yes, it is love that will save our world and our civ­i­liza­tion, love even for enemies.

- Now let me has­ten to say that Jesus was very seri­ous when he gave this com­mand; he wasn't play­ing. He real­ized that it's hard to love your ene­mies. He real­ized that it's dif­fi­cult to love those per­sons who seek to defeat you, those per­sons who say evil things about you. He real­ized that it was painfully hard, press­ingly hard. But he wasn't play­ing. We have the Chris­t­ian and moral respon­si­bil­ity to seek to dis­cover the mean­ing of these words, and to dis­cover how we can live out this com­mand, and why we should live by this command.

- Now first let us deal with this ques­tion, which is the prac­ti­cal ques­tion: How do you go about lov­ing your ene­mies? I think the first thing is this: In order to love your ene­mies, you must begin by ana­lyz­ing self. And I'm sure that seems strange to you, that I start out telling you this morn­ing that you love your ene­mies by begin­ning with a look at self. It seems to me that that is the first and fore­most way to come to an ade­quate dis­cov­ery to the how of this situation.

- Now, I'm aware of the fact that some peo­ple will not like you, not because of some­thing you have done to them, but they just won't like you. But after look­ing at these things and admit­ting these things, we must face the fact that an indi­vid­ual might dis­like us because of some­thing that we've done deep down in the past, some per­son­al­ity attribute that we pos­sess, some­thing that we've done deep down in the past and we've for­got­ten about it; but it was that some­thing that aroused the hate response within the indi­vid­ual. That is why I say, begin with your­self. There might be some­thing within you that arouses the tragic hate response in the other individual.

- This is true in our inter­na­tional strug­gle. Democ­racy is the great­est form of gov­ern­ment to my mind that man has ever con­ceived, but the weak­ness is that we have never touched it. We must face the fact that the rhyth­mic beat of the deep rum­blings of dis­con­tent from Asia and Africa is at bot­tom a revolt against the impe­ri­al­ism and colo­nial­ism per­pet­u­ated by West­ern civ­i­liza­tion all these many years.

- And this is what Jesus means when he said: "How is it that you can see the mote in your brother's eye and not see the beam in your own eye?" And this is one of the tragedies of human nature. So we begin to love our ene­mies and love those per­sons that hate us whether in col­lec­tive life or indi­vid­ual life by look­ing at ourselves.

- A sec­ond thing that an indi­vid­ual must do in seek­ing to love his enemy is to dis­cover the ele­ment of good in his enemy, and every time you begin to hate that per­son and think of hat­ing that per­son, real­ize that there is some good there and look at those good points which will over-balance the bad points.

- Some­how the "isness" of our present nature is out of har­mony with the eter­nal "ought­ness" that for­ever con­fronts us. And this sim­ply means this: That within the best of us, there is some evil, and within the worst of us, there is some good. When we come to see this, we take a dif­fer­ent atti­tude toward indi­vid­u­als. The per­son who hates you most has some good in him; even the nation that hates you most has some good in it; even the race that hates you most has some good in it. And when you come to the point that you look in the face of every man and see deep down within him what reli­gion calls "the image of God," you begin to love him in spite of. No mat­ter what he does, you see God's image there. There is an ele­ment of good­ness that he can never slough off. Dis­cover the ele­ment of good in your enemy. And as you seek to hate him, find the cen­ter of good­ness and place your atten­tion there and you will take a new attitude.

- Another way that you love your enemy is this: When the oppor­tu­nity presents itself for you to defeat your enemy, that is the time which you must not do it. There will come a time, in many instances, when the per­son who hates you most, the per­son who has mis­used you most, the per­son who has gos­siped about you most, the per­son who has spread false rumors about you most, there will come a time when you will have an oppor­tu­nity to defeat that per­son. It might be in terms of a rec­om­men­da­tion for a job; it might be in terms of help­ing that per­son to make some move in life. That's the time you must do it. That is the mean­ing of love. In the final analy­sis, love is not this sen­ti­men­tal some­thing that we talk about. It's not merely an emo­tional some­thing. Love is cre­ative, under­stand­ing good­will for all men. It is the refusal to defeat any indi­vid­ual. When you rise to the level of love, of its great beauty and power, you seek only to defeat evil sys­tems. Indi­vid­u­als who hap­pen to be caught up in that sys­tem, you love, but you seek to defeat the system.

- The Greek lan­guage, as I've said so often before, is very pow­er­ful at this point. It comes to our aid beau­ti­fully in giv­ing us the real mean­ing and depth of the whole phi­los­o­phy of love. And I think it is quite apro­pos at this point, for you see the Greek lan­guage has three words for love, inter­est­ingly enough. It talks about love as eros. That's one word for love. Eros is a sort of, aes­thetic love. Plato talks about it a great deal in his dia­logues, a sort of yearn­ing of the soul for the realm of the gods. And it's come to us to be a sort of roman­tic love, though it's a beau­ti­ful love. Every­body has expe­ri­enced eros in all of its beauty when you find some indi­vid­ual that is attrac­tive to you and that you pour out all of your like and your love on that indi­vid­ual. That is eros, you see, and it's a pow­er­ful, beau­ti­ful love that is given to us through all of the beauty of lit­er­a­ture; we read about it.

- Then the Greek lan­guage talks about philia, and that's another type of love that's also beau­ti­ful. It is a sort of inti­mate affec­tion between per­sonal friends. And this is the type of love that you have for those per­sons that you're friendly with, your inti­mate friends, or peo­ple that you call on the tele­phone and you go by to have din­ner with, and your room­mate in col­lege and that type of thing. It's a sort of rec­i­p­ro­cal love. On this level, you like a per­son because that per­son likes you. You love on this level, because you are loved. You love on this level, because there's some­thing about the per­son you love that is like­able to you. This too is a beau­ti­ful love. You can com­mu­ni­cate with a per­son; you have cer­tain things in com­mon; you like to do things together. This is philia.

- The Greek lan­guage comes out with another word for love. It is the word agape. And agape is more than eros; agape is more than philia; agape is some­thing of the under­stand­ing, cre­ative, redemp­tive good­will for all men. It is a love that seeks noth­ing in return. It is an over­flow­ing love; it's what the­olo­gians would call the love of God work­ing in the lives of men. And when you rise to love on this level, you begin to love men, not because they are like­able, but because God loves them. You look at every man, and you love him because you know God loves him. And he might be the worst per­son you've ever seen.

- And this is what Jesus means, I think, in this very pas­sage when he says, "Love your enemy." And it's sig­nif­i­cant that he does not say, "Like your enemy." Like is a sen­ti­men­tal some­thing, an affec­tion­ate some­thing. There are a lot of peo­ple that I find it dif­fi­cult to like. I don't like what they do to me. I don't like what they say about me and other peo­ple. I don't like their atti­tudes. I don't like some of the things they're doing. I don't like them. But Jesus says love them. And love is greater than like. Love is under­stand­ing, redemp­tive good­will for all men, so that you love every­body, because God loves them. You refuse to do any­thing that will defeat an indi­vid­ual, because you have agape in your soul. And here you come to the point that you love the indi­vid­ual who does the evil deed, while hat­ing the deed that the per­son does. This is what Jesus means when he says, "Love your enemy." This is the way to do it. When the oppor­tu­nity presents itself when you can defeat your enemy, you must not do it.

- Now for the few moments left, let us move from the prac­ti­cal how to the the­o­ret­i­cal why. It's not only nec­es­sary to know how to go about lov­ing your ene­mies, but also to go down into the ques­tion of why we should love our ene­mies. I think the first rea­son that we should love our ene­mies, and I think this was at the very cen­ter of Jesus' think­ing, is this: that hate for hate only inten­si­fies the exis­tence of hate and evil in the uni­verse. If I hit you and you hit me and I hit you back and you hit me back and go on, you see, that goes on ad infini­tum. It just never ends. Some­where some­body must have a lit­tle sense, and that's the strong per­son. The strong per­son is the per­son who can cut off the chain of hate, the chain of evil. And that is the tragedy of hate — that it doesn't cut it off. It only inten­si­fies the exis­tence of hate and evil in the uni­verse. Some­body must have reli­gion enough and moral­ity enough to cut it off and inject within the very struc­ture of the uni­verse that strong and pow­er­ful ele­ment of love.

- I think I men­tioned before that some time ago my brother and I were dri­ving one evening to Chat­tanooga, Ten­nessee, from Atlanta. He was dri­ving the car. And for some rea­son the dri­vers were very dis­cour­te­ous that night. They didn't dim their lights; hardly any dri­ver that passed by dimmed his lights. And I remem­ber very vividly, my brother A. D. looked over and in a tone of anger said: "I know what I'm going to do. The next car that comes along here and refuses to dim the lights, I'm going to fail to dim mine and pour them on in all of their power." And I looked at him right quick and said: "Oh no, don't do that. There'd be too much light on this high­way, and it will end up in mutual destruc­tion for all. Some­body got to have some sense on this highway."

- Some­body must have sense enough to dim the lights, and that is the trou­ble, isn't it? That as all of the civ­i­liza­tions of the world move up the high­way of his­tory, so many civ­i­liza­tions, hav­ing looked at other civ­i­liza­tions that refused to dim the lights, and they decided to refuse to dim theirs. And Toyn­bee tells that out of the twenty-two civ­i­liza­tions that have risen up, all but about seven have found them­selves in the junk heap of destruc­tion. It is because civ­i­liza­tions fail to have sense enough to dim the lights. And if some­body doesn't have sense enough to turn on the dim and beau­ti­ful and pow­er­ful lights of love in this world, the whole of our civ­i­liza­tion will be plunged into the abyss of destruc­tion. And we will all end up destroyed because nobody had any sense on the high­way of history.

"Some­where some­body must have some sense. Men must see that force begets force, hate begets hate, tough­ness begets tough­ness. And it is all a descend­ing spi­ral, ulti­mately end­ing in destruc­tion for all and every­body. Some­body must have sense enough and moral­ity enough to cut off the chain of hate and the chain of evil in the uni­verse. And you do that by love.

- There's another rea­son why you should love your ene­mies, and that is because hate dis­torts the per­son­al­ity of the hater. We usu­ally think of what hate does for the indi­vid­ual hated or the indi­vid­u­als hated or the groups hated. But it is even more tragic, it is even more ruinous and inju­ri­ous to the indi­vid­ual who hates. You just begin hat­ing some­body, and you will begin to do irra­tional things. You can't see straight when you hate. You can't walk straight when you hate. You can't stand upright. Your vision is dis­torted. There is noth­ing more tragic than to see an indi­vid­ual whose heart is filled with hate. He comes to the point that he becomes a patho­log­i­cal case. For the per­son who hates, you can stand up and see a per­son and that per­son can be beau­ti­ful, and you will call them ugly. For the per­son who hates, the beau­ti­ful becomes ugly and the ugly becomes beau­ti­ful. For the per­son who hates, the good becomes bad and the bad becomes good. For the per­son who hates, the true becomes false and the false becomes true. That's what hate does. You can't see right. The sym­bol of objec­tiv­ity is lost. Hate destroys the very struc­ture of the per­son­al­ity of the hater.

- The way to be inte­grated with your­self is be sure that you meet every sit­u­a­tion of life with an abound­ing love. Never hate, because it ends up in tragic, neu­rotic responses. Psy­chol­o­gists and psy­chi­a­trists are telling us today that the more we hate, the more we develop guilt feel­ings and we begin to sub­con­sciously repress or con­sciously sup­press cer­tain emo­tions, and they all stack up in our sub­con­scious selves and make for tragic, neu­rotic responses. And may this not be the neu­roses of many indi­vid­u­als as they con­front life that that is an ele­ment of hate there. And mod­ern psy­chol­ogy is call­ing on us now to love. But long before mod­ern psy­chol­ogy came into being, the world's great­est psy­chol­o­gist who walked around the hills of Galilee told us to love. He looked at men and said: "Love your ene­mies; don't hate any­body." It's not enough for us to hate your friends because– to to love your friends– because when you start hat­ing any­body, it destroys the very cen­ter of your cre­ative response to life and the uni­verse; so love every­body. Hate at any point is a can­cer that gnaws away at the very vital cen­ter of your life and your exis­tence. It is like erod­ing acid that eats away the best and the objec­tive cen­ter of your life. So Jesus says love, because hate destroys the hater as well as the hated.

- Now there is a final rea­son I think that Jesus says, "Love your ene­mies." It is this: that love has within it a redemp­tive power. And there is a power there that even­tu­ally trans­forms indi­vid­u­als. That's why Jesus says, "Love your ene­mies." Because if you hate your ene­mies, you have no way to redeem and to trans­form your ene­mies. But if you love your ene­mies, you will dis­cover that at the very root of love is the power of redemp­tion. You just keep lov­ing peo­ple and keep lov­ing them, even though they're mis­treat­ing you. Here's the per­son who is a neigh­bor, and this per­son is doing some­thing wrong to you and all of that. Just keep being friendly to that per­son. Keep lov­ing them. Don't do any­thing to embar­rass them. Just keep lov­ing them, and they can't stand it too long. Oh, they react in many ways in the begin­ning. They react with bit­ter­ness because they're mad because you love them like that. They react with guilt feel­ings, and some­times they'll hate you a lit­tle more at that tran­si­tion period, but just keep lov­ing them. And by the power of your love they will break down under the load. That's love, you see. It is redemp­tive, and this is why Jesus says love. There's some­thing about love that builds up and is cre­ative. There is some­thing about hate that tears down and is destruc­tive. So love your enemies.

- There is a power in love that our world has not dis­cov­ered yet. Jesus dis­cov­ered it cen­turies ago. Mahatma Gandhi of India dis­cov­ered it a few years ago, but most men and most women never dis­cover it. For they believe in hit­ting for hit­ting; they believe in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth; they believe in hat­ing for hat­ing; but Jesus comes to us and says, "This isn't the way."

- As we look out across the years and across the gen­er­a­tions, let us develop and move right here. We must dis­cover the power of love, the power, the redemp­tive power of love. And when we dis­cover that we will be able to make of this old world a new world. We will be able to make men bet­ter. Love is the only way. Jesus dis­cov­ered that.

- And our civ­i­liza­tion must dis­cover that. Indi­vid­u­als must dis­cover that as they deal with other indi­vid­u­als. There is a lit­tle tree planted on a lit­tle hill and on that tree hangs the most influ­en­tial char­ac­ter that ever came in this world. But never feel that that tree is a mean­ing­less drama that took place on the stages of his­tory. Oh no, it is a tele­scope through which we look out into the long vista of eter­nity, and see the love of God break­ing forth into time. It is an eter­nal reminder to a power-drunk gen­er­a­tion that love is the only way. It is an eter­nal reminder to a gen­er­a­tion depend­ing on nuclear and atomic energy, a gen­er­a­tion depend­ing on phys­i­cal vio­lence, that love is the only cre­ative, redemp­tive, trans­form­ing power in the universe.

- So this morn­ing, as I look into your eyes, and into the eyes of all of my broth­ers in Alabama and all over Amer­ica and over the world, I say to you, "I love you. I would rather die than hate you." And I'm fool­ish enough to believe that through the power of this love some­where, men of the most recal­ci­trant bent will be trans­formed. And then we will be in God's kingdom.-

—

Some of Dr. King's many mem­o­rable words:

"Injus­tice any­where is a threat to jus­tice everywhere.

"The ulti­mate mea­sure of a man is not where he stands in moments of com­fort and con­ve­nience, but where he stands at times of chal­lenge and controversy.

"He who pas­sively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to per­pe­trate it. He who accepts evil with­out protest­ing against it is really coop­er­at­ing with it.

"An indi­vid­ual has not started liv­ing until he can rise above the nar­row con­fines of his indi­vid­u­al­is­tic con­cerns to the broader con­cerns of all humanity.

"Life's most per­sis­tent and urgent ques­tion is, 'What are you doing for others?'

"What­ever affects one directly, affects all indi­rectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the inter­re­lated struc­ture of reality.

"Phil­an­thropy is com­mend­able, but it must not cause the phil­an­thropist to over­look the cir­cum­stances of eco­nomic injus­tice which make phil­an­thropy necessary.

"True com­pas­sion is more than fling­ing a coin to a beg­gar; it comes to see that an edi­fice which pro­duces beg­gars needs restructuring.

"It is not enough to say we must not wage war. It is nec­es­sary to love peace and sac­ri­fice for it.

"Peace is not merely a dis­tant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal.

"Non­vi­o­lence means avoid­ing not only exter­nal phys­i­cal vio­lence but also inter­nal vio­lence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him.

"I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a bur­den to bear.

"I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so trag­i­cally bound to the star­less mid­night of racism and war that the bright day­break of peace and broth­er­hood can never become a real­ity... I believe that unarmed truth and uncon­di­tional love will have the final word."

—

Finally, I want to share one of my Christ­mas presents with you. My wife Terri asked a remark­able artist — John Kachik — to cre­ate a por­trait of the three peace­mak­ers that I admire most — Dr. Mar­tin Luther King, Jr., Jimmy Carter, and Thich Nhat Hanh. I am blessed to know two of them as friends. Decades ago, Dr. King and Thay also became friends. That friend­ship was born of a com­mon under­stand­ing of the inter­con­nect­ed­ness of human­ity — in Dr. King's words, "we are caught in an inescapable net­work of mutu­al­ity, tied in a sin­gle gar­ment of des­tiny, and what affects one directly affects all indi­rectly." In 1967, Dr. King nom­i­nated Thay for the Nobel Peace Prize, and gave the speech Beyond Viet­nam, say­ing "We are called to speak for the weak, for the voice­less, for the vic­tims of our nation and for those it calls 'enemy,' for no doc­u­ment from human hands can make these humans any less our broth­ers." Happy Birth­day Dr. King.

—

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