Today, the ceremonial groundbreaking for the new Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial happened in Washington, DC. The memorial will reside just east of the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall. King, the first African American honored with his own memorial in the National Mall area, is the third non-President to be commemorated in this way. According to the Nobel Foundation, Martin Luther King, Jr “was arrested upwards of twenty times and assaulted at least four times; he was awarded five honorary degrees, was named Man of the Year by Time Magazine in 1963, and became not only the symbolic leader of American blacks but also a world figure.”

Since the U.S. invaded Iraq, there has been an overlying air of contention that we’ve created another Vietnam. Parallels have been made without certain conclusion. The debate is fierce, the stand largely relying on views concerning America’s dependancy on certain natural resources, the credibility of the current administration, and the WMD reports that gave our military its justification to invade in March 2003. In his blog The Democrat’s Diary, British writer David Wearing commented back in September fo 2005, stating that “King rose at Manhattan’s Riverside Church to deliver a blistering attack on the Vietnam War. He said that the U.S. was in Vietnam, not to liberate it, but ‘to occupy it as an American colony.’ He roundly condemned his government as ‘the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.’”

While it’s clear that Martin Luther King Jr. would have most likely opposed the war in Iraq, I wonder, had he been alive during 9/11 and the following years, would he have spoken against the war, and would the nation’s reaction have influenced the government in a profound way? If the United States was indeed clumsily rushing to war, would such a speech have injected some feeling of trepidation in the hearts and minds of our political leaders? Or was this war, in effect, a sort of military coup d’etat?

Juan Cole, President of the Global Americana Institute, predicted King’s response to the Iraq War in his blog Informed Comment. He writes, “every year we honor Martin, and we hear again his stirring speech, ‘I have a Dream.’ But in many ways, that speech is among the least challenging of his charges to us, however hard and unfulfilled it remains. He dreamed other dreams, of the end of exploitative materialism and relentless militarism, of an America devoted to social justice and creative non-violence…”

Martin Luther King, J. continues to inspire us decades after his death. This nw achievement for civil rights – the memorial that is to place this charismatic leader with Lincoln, Washington, and Jefferson in the National Mall – indeed serves to solidify America’s pledge to fight for human rights, regardless of the disenfranchised group. Now, it’s our duty to pressure our law makers to help us fulfill that pledge, as MLK sought to do during his “I Have a Dream” speech on August 28, 1963:

“…[t]his note was a promise that all men…would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the negro people a bad check – a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’ But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.”