Today in the U.S. is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Let' s take some time today to reflect upon our role in the continuing efforts to envision and manifest a just society. We all have a responsibility -- and each of us has unique talents -- to move this vision forward, and to do what we can to make it a reality.

The following quote is from 1967, but I think it is still quite relevant today:

" In the days ahead we must not consider it unpatriotic to raise certain basic questions about our national character. We must begin to ask, ' Why are there forty million poor people in a nation overflowing with such unbelievable affluence?' Why has our nation placed itself in the position of being God' s military agent on Earth...? Why have we substituted the arrogant undertaking of policing the whole world for the high task of putting our own house in order?
" All these questions remind us that there is a need for a radical restructuring of the architecture of American society. For its very suvival' s sake, America must re-examine old presuppositions and release itself from many things that for centuries have been held sacred. For the evils of racism, poverty and militarism to die, a new set of values must be born. Our economy must become more person-centered than property- and profit-centered. Our government must depend more on its moral power than on its military power.
" ...Let us be those creative dissenters who will call our beloved nation to a higher destiny, to a new plateau of compassion, to a more noble expression of humaneness.
" We are superbly equipped to do this. We have been seared in the flames of suffering. We have known the agony of being the underdog. We have learned from our have-not status that it profits a nation little to gain the whole world of means and lose the end, the soul. We must have a passion for peace born out of wretchedness and the misery of war. Giving our ultimate allegiances to the empire of justice, we must be that colony of dissenters seeking to imbue our nation with the ideals of a higher and nobler order."

--Martin Luther King, Jr.
from " Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?"