(AP Photo/Horace Cort)
Friends:
Today is the day America commemorates the life of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. — but often only part of his life is honored, and another part is omitted.
In popular culture, Dr. King is most remembered for his 1965 “I Have A Dream” speech and his leadership role in the civil rights battle against Jim Crow. But another significant speech came two years later at New York’s Riverside Church. It was an oration that previewed the themes of what Dr. King called the Poor People’s Campaign for social and economic justice — and it generated a torrent of anger from the media and political establishment.
I listen to this speech every year on this day, because it remains one of history’s most brave jeremiads against what Dr. King called “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.”
It is the speech in which he demanded an end to the Vietnam War and slammed “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.”
It is the speech in which he said, "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
It is the speech in which he called for “a radical revolution of values,” in which “we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.”
And it is the speech that got Dr. King vilified by the power elite because it skewered their predation.
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To read more of this oped by David Sirota, to go: https://www.dailyposter.com/a-...evolution-of-values/
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