It sure wasn’t easy for a nine year old kid to make sense of the world in 1968. I was getting one version of reality at home, in school, and at church, and a comforting version it was, as it taught me my place (on top), and my country’s place (on top), and pretty much  everyone else in the world’s place in the cosmic and global hierarchy. But … there was an alternate version, and that one arrived weekly via LIFE Magazine, which I read religiously. And I can still remember the photos and the confusion they spawned, especially in 1968. Photos of American troops reeling in retreat during Tet. Huh? Athletes giving the black power salute at the Olympics. Furious kids in the streets of Chicago and the offices of the President of Columbia University. Bobby Kennedy lying on the floor of a hotel kitchen.

And, of course, a balcony in Memphis.

It all didn’t add up.

Looking back at what was by any standards an astonishing year, there is much to celebrate and much to mourn, but it’s taken me years to realize that perhaps the most profound event of the year was the death of Martin Luther King. I suppose I downplayed it–after all, King had delivered (what I thought was) his most important speech years earlier, had already registered his signal accomplishments–had arrived at the banks of the Jordan.  His death was sad, to be sure–but I figured his glory days were already behind him.

I was a fool.  

But it wasn’t just me. The media and the collective culture succeeded where J. Edgar Hoover had failed–by taking an entirely different tack than had the FBI Director. Hoover considered King the most dangerous man in America, and went after him. Big mistake. How much more effective society has been at defanging the man, stripping away the genuine threat he posed, not simply to Jim Crow, but to the military-industrial complex at large. Meaning that today, once again, we heard snippets of the “I Have A Dream Speech”–but we didn’t hear much about the magnificent speech he gave in April 1967 at Riverside Church–“Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence.” A speech as courageous as any he gave, and quite possibly the one that marked him for death.  We  heard about the marches in Selma and Montgomery–but not much about The Poor People’s March. We heard tributes to King’s vision of a color-blind society–but not his chilling and exact measure of a society where the gulf between rich and poor was, and remains, all-too-obvious to anyone with eyes to see.  We heard about what a “great American” he was, but not the words he used to damn America for her imperialist aggression, words no less harsh than those that got the Reverend Wright and his protege Obama into a spot of hot water last summer.

All of which is a damn shame, because not only did black Americans lose an irreplaceable icon–I can’t begin to presume to comprehend what that loss would have meant, and still, means–but poor people lost a champion who might have done for their class what he did for his race, and social democrats and antiwar activists (and pretty much everyone sharing the vision that would eventually become the foundations of the Green Party) lost a leader capable of uniting those factions. King really was irreplaceable–there was no one capable of picking up where he left off, of attacking power with the eloquence and credibility he did, of inspiring and equally important cementing a movement that, sadly, crested in 1968, only to have its various factions fracture, and, in pursuing their own narrow goals, render themselves impotent.  

And so today I spent less time thinking and celebrating what King achieved in Act I of his life, and more about how we’ve failed to live up the promise of what might have been Act II.

You can read that entire April ’67 speech here (there’s an audio link as well). If Vietnam seems long ago and far away, you can replace the word “Vietnam” with the current country of your choosing–there’s a pretty long list (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Uzbekistan, Honduras, Colombia … etc) from which to choose.  (And there’s something else you might try: list the Green Party Ten Key Values, and check off every time, in this speech, you find Dr. King espousing one or the other. The results are interesting.)

If you don’t have the time–well, these paragraphs continue to strike me as the most important words delivered from a podium last century–or since. Compare them, if you will, to Obama’s inaugaration speech: ” We will not apologize for our way of life.”

…the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. 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. We must rapidly begin…we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

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.