Listening to MLK's message carefully

As the day to celebrate Martin Luther King rolls around this year, I am perplexed that even though an entire day has been dedicated to this honorable man- his message hasn't really been listened to. The words he used in the hopes of changing society back then, continue to be very applicable to today. Why is it that it is so hard to learn from the past? Even when we recognize the importance of something, it seems enough to so many people to just nod their heads and on one hand and say, " oh yes, that man speaks the truth" but on the other hand do or tolerate the complete opposite.

MLK's message was not just about having a black man and a white man holding hands together while singing "Kumbaya" and believing that the problems of the world would be solved (which is how this is often present to children in US schools). He had a much more global message that hit deep into the heart of a severe economic, political and most of all moral problem that effects the world. He was very much against the use of the military to solve problems and heavily criticized his own government about the things that it continues to do today such as, abandoning the effort to make drastic changes in the government in order to prevent so much poverty in one of the richest countries in the world. Despite his criticism, it is admirable to observe that MLK did this all while loving his nation.

The following is a powerful example that I came accross from a speech he made on April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in New York City:

"I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. ... A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, 'This is not just.' It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, 'This is not just.' The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, 'This way of settling differences is not just.' This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."