In honor of...

This is the time of year I used to teach the civil rights movement. Ruby Bridges, Rosa Parks, Edward Till, these are my heroes ordinary people placed in extraordinary circumstances and their lives changed the face of a nation....As we consider 5 years in a worthless war consider the words of MLK 40 years prior.....some things have changed some has endured.

"There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor—both black and white—through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings.
Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such."

Martin Luther King Jr., April 4, 1967, Riverside Church