In Martin Luther King Jr’s most famous speech, he had a dream.

But in another of King’s important addresses, he faced the depth
of our nightmare.

We all know the famous words -- "I have a dream" -- delivered on the
steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963: "I have a dream
that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning
of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men
are created equal."

On this day that we mark with his name, all over this country,
that speech will be played, as it should be. King articulated
-- perhaps more eloquently than anyone had to that point
-- the demand that the United States make good on the American
dream, for all its citizens.

But on April 4, 1967, at the Riverside Church in New York City,
in a speech titled "Beyond Vietnam," King spoke just as eloquently
of the nightmare that lies underneath that dream. In that speech
to Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam, King not only made
a compelling case for ending the U.S. attack on Vietnam,
but went beyond that to diagnose a failed society.

On this day that we mark with his name, we owe it to King
-- and to ourselves -- to face that failure honestly.

This might sound crazy in a world in which the United States
dominates as no nation has ever dominated. After all, we won
the Cold War. We are the largest economy in the world.
Our cultural products circulate everywhere. The world fears
our military. We are the most affluent nation in the history
of the world. And we have a black secretary of state.
A failed society? The United States? To borrow from a
younger generation, "We rule!"

Yes, we rule, sort of, for a time. But we also are a failed
society, a society heading toward collapse. We might remember
that nothing looks quite as invincible as a great army on
the morning of its greatest defeat.

The majority of King’s Riverside speech was dedicated to
an analysis of the Vietnam War and an argument for a political
settlement of that conflict. Although many wanted him to avoid
the controversial subject of the war, King said he was moved
"to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from
the burnings of my own heart," to go "beyond the prophesying
of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent
based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history."

When he did that, King reached a difficult conclusion, that
"the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" was
"my own government." He saw what imperial war does not only
to the target, to those on whom the bombs fall, but also
to the aggressor society: "If America's soul becomes totally
poisoned," King said, "part of the autopsy must read Vietnam.
It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes
of men the world over."

We might pause to consider what that means for us today,
as the United States fights another imperial war, this one
in the Middle East. If we were to go beyond a "smooth patriotism"
and let conscience guide us to a "firm dissent," what actions
are required of us?

But I want to put aside for now the issue of wars, past and present,
and speak of King’s deeper analysis in that speech. He knew that
simply condemning that war was "seductively tempting," but that
his principles demanded that he "go on now to say something even
more disturbing." King was blunt: "The war in Vietnam is but
a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit,"
a condition that had left the United States "on the wrong side
of a world revolution." He continued:

"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 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, materialism, and militarism are incapable
of being conquered." "our loyalties must become ecumenical
rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an
overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve
the best in their individual societies. This call for a
world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond
one’s tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call
for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men."

In short, Martin Luther King Jr. saw that the task of the
United States was not simply to transcend racism. He saw
racism as inextricably connected to militarism and materialism.
And he saw a hyperpatriotic nationalism not as virtue but
as a problem to be overcome.

So, we find ourselves today in an odd place: In a country
in which we routinely repeat the phrase "God bless America"
with no sense of shame; in which conventional politicians
all clamor to be "tough" on national security and support
bloated military budgets; in which the shopping mall is the
real temple where people go to worship -- in that country,
King is a hero. That means the King who condemned not only
racism but nationalism, militarism, and materialism has
to be pushed aside, forgotten -- "whitewashed," if you’ll
allow the term. King’s radical political analysis and vision
have to be rendered invisible if we are to name a holiday
after him. After years of calling him a traitor and a
troublemaker, white America is willing to allow King
is to serve as the icon for a national quest for racial
justice, but only so long as we don’t actually listen
to what he had to say or take it seriously.

None of this is surprising; it’s the nature of power:
When faced with demands for justice by a movement of
oppressed people, dominant groups tend to concede only
as much as necessary to relieve the pressure. When enough
time has passed and the threat to the system has been
contained, then the importance of the movement and some
of its leaders can be acknowledged, but only if their legacy
can be constructed in a way that doesn’t undermine the
existing distribution of power.

The nature of privilege is to ignore these realities when
they make us uncomfortable. We white people have that privilege.
We have that privilege because we live in a white-supremacist
society. It is true that the United States made enormous
progress on race in the last half of the 20th century,
but we still live in a white-supremacist society.
What do I mean by that?

By "white supremacist," I mean a society whose founding is based
in an ideology of the inherent superiority of white Europeans
over non-whites, an ideology that was used to justify the
inhuman crimes against indigenous people and Africans that
created the nation and its wealth, an ideology that also has
justified legal and extralegal exploitation of every non-white
immigrant group in our history.

By "white supremacist," I also mean a material reality. Forty
years after the victories of the civil-rights movement that
ended legal segregation, dramatic racialized disparities
in wealth and well-being endure. On some measures, such
as family income and unemployment, the gap between white
and black America is wider today than it was in the immediate
aftermath of the civil-rights legislation of the 1960s.
On other measures where there has been some progress,
such as home ownership, closing the gap will take decades
or centuries if current trends continue.

This is a society in which white people occupy most of the
top positions in powerful institutions, with similar privileges
available in limited ways to non-white people if they fit
themselves into white society. It is a society in which many
white people hold to that supremacist ideology, believing
the culture, politics, philosophy, and art that comes
out of white Europe to be superior to all others (even
if they won’t admit in public that they believe this).

If white America were truly interested in racial justice,
would we not ask, simply, "why?" Why do so many still believe
that? Why are the racialized disparities still with us?

We don’t ask because the answer is all too clear and painful:
Most white folks don’t much care, and privilege allows us not
to care.

What will it take for the United States to transcend white
supremacy? It seems obvious that it requires a revolution.
But what kind? King called for "a true revolution of values"
based in a rejection of the fundamental injustice of the
systems in which we live. In King’s words:

"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."

"A true revolution of values will lay hands 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 veins of people normally humane, of sending
men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped
and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom,
justice and love."

In 1967, King laid it out clearly: "A nation that continues year
after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs
of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." In 2006, that
spiritual death is closer than ever, as it is clearer than ever
that it is not "military defense" on which we spend but "military
offense."

At some level, I believe we all know this to be true. We all know
the grotesque and widening inequality -- within our own society
and between the First and the Third worlds -- cannot continue
indefinitely. We know that the belligerent militarism designed
to secure resources cannot continue indefinitely. At some level,
somewhere within us all, we know that the path this society
is on is not the road up to a better future, but a spiral down
to something that will look like hell made real in the world.
We rule, for now. But how long can that continue?

We know the cost to the world of the quest for domination.
About half the world’s population lives on less than $2 a day,
and a quarter on less than $1 a day. Iraqis count their dead
in the tens -- perhaps hundreds -- of thousands as a result
of U.S. liberation. Those are the bills being paid elsewhere.

What of the cost to us? What of our spiritual death?

The shopping malls are full. Does it fulfill our longing
for community? Does it make us feel loved?

We "support the troops." Does it fulfill our obligations
to the world? Does it make us safe?

What judgment would Martin Luther King Jr. render if he were
with us today? Lucky for us, we don’t have to face that.
The great thing about dead heroes is that they can’t speak.
The theologian and historian Vincent Harding quotes a poem
by Carl Wendell Hines:

Now that he is safely dead
Let us praise him
build monuments to his glory
sing hosannas to his name.
Dead men make
such convenient heroes: They
cannot rise
to challenge the images
we would fashion from their lives.
And besides,
it is easier to build monuments
than to make a better world.
http://www.aril.org/king.html

But, of course, it doesn’t matter what King would say.
It matters what we say, and -- as King always pointed out
-- it matters what we do.

If you live in privilege, as I do, one thing is for sure:
You haven’t done enough. I haven’t done enough. We haven’t
done enough. If we had, this world would look very different
than it does.

We all carry that burden, one that is more than we should have
to face. In this world, it should be enough to just be a decent
person -- to work hard, treat folks around us fairly, care
for those we love. That’s difficult enough in a world full
of disappointment, disease, and death. Just being an ordinary
person is hard enough.

But at this moment in history, being decent in our private lives
is not enough. There is too much at stake, and too little time
to correct the course. We face crises on all fronts: Political,
economic, cultural, and most dramatically, ecological. We cannot
know how much time is left before destructive forces set
in motion cannot be turned back. We should be scared, and
that fear should motivate us.

King was scared. In the new book, At Canaan’s Edge: America
in the King Years 1965-68, Taylor Branch writes about how
King was tired and struggling with depression in the last
months of his life. I believe King understood how little
time there was, not just for him but for us all.

So, we have to face what one writer has called "the long
emergency." There can be no illusions about the nature of
the struggle required to create a different world, a world
based not on domination but on a new communion among peoples.
The choice still remains the one King asked us to face:
"nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation."

Privilege makes it easy to hide, but soon there will be
no hiding from the need to act. To turn from this knowledge
of the world and its demands on those of us with privilege
is to turn from the values of justice and equality that
we claim to hold. Worse than that, it is to turn away from
our own humanity. And if the call to justice, the yearning
for our own humanity isn’t motivation enough, realize this:
Soon, to hide will be to resign ourselves to that hell
on earth that we are creating.

To act is to have faith, in ourselves and in the possibility
that there is time. If King were alive today, we can be sure
he would ask that of us. And we can look to King’s words
on that April night in New York in 1967 for a reminder
of what fate awaits us if we turn away:

"If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long,
dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those
who possess power without compassion, might without morality,
and strength without sight."

If we act, there is no guarantee that we can make right all
that has been torn asunder. We cannot wait for certainty,
but must act out of love, with hope. It is through our action
that we learn to love and feel hope. That action is the way
we make love real in the world and find hope in our hearts.

I don’t pretend to know what King would say if he were alive
today. I don’t know what analysis he would offer or what
strategy he would propose. But he would certainly challenge
all of us to act -- every one of us here today, everyone
in this country, which has the opportunity to turn its
power away from wealth and war, toward justice and peace.
Whatever else King would say, he would say this:

Act. Now. Before the only path before us is that long, dark,
shameful corridor, which ends at a door we should all pray
is never opened.

Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University
of Texas and member of the board of the Third Coast Activist
Resource Center in Austin.

He is the author of
The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege
http://www.citylights.com/pub/catalog/BCheart.html
and Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity.
http://www.citylights.com/pub/catalog/BCcitizensempire.html