My own government
When I was in school, the mission and dream of Martin Luther King was taught as a history lesson. I learned a little about segregation and listened to stories of King's struggle as though it were something completely in the past that has no relationship to the world today.
Conservatism or the desire to avoid controversy probably causes many teachers to refrain from teaching the relevance of King's words today. I saw a TV 20 news report last night that featured children speaking about what King might say today. They aired many references to self-reliance and how the black community can improve itself. I didn't hear any references to continued segregation in housing and schools, the extreme disparities in funding between majority white and black school districts in Illinois, poverty, or the war in Iraq.
As long as America is engaged in a war of aggression, I believe this speech should be read by every citizen on this day.
One paragraph from this speech on Vietnam:
My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.His words throughout the speech are as applicable today as they were then.