This entry below from a Truthout email reminds me about how we need to keep alive the real dreams of Martin Luther King.
The mainstream media and our political leaders rarely allow Martin Luther King, Jr.’s adamant stand against the Vietnam War into the national conversation. Last week a Pentagon official took this bastardization of King’s words to a new height by saying that King, a strident opponent of violence and of empire, would have been a supporter of current US war policy. (Here’s a link to the speech by the Pentagon’s General Counsel. Don’t read pages six and seven if you have a sensitive stomach.)
Also conveniently edited out of news coverage, textbooks and remembrance speeches is King’s passionate advocacy for workers’ rights and the poor. Perhaps most dangerous to the balance of power in the US, King took direct and unyielding opposition to the economic system which allows for unprecedented consolidation of power and wealth by plutocrats.
Independent voices must call out and condemn this kind of creepy, selective editing of King’s message and protect his words. His message about peace resonates even louder in today’s America:
"This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions. 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."
P.S. Happy birthday also to Michelle Obama and to me. We share the same birthday!