As we celebrate the life and achievements of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I am reminded of his prescient and courageous speech against the Vietnam War, delivered at Riverside Church in Manhattan on April 4, 1967, just one year before he was assassinated.

The speech is much too rich in content, analysis, and rhetoric to summarize here, but this segment is particularly appropriate at a time when the country is sinking into recession, poverty rates are on the rise, and we are in the midst of a seemingly endless war that will cost taxpayers and our economy as a whole over $2 trillion at the least:

"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 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 this 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."

I wish his words didn't resonate today as clearly as they do. It's up to us to change that.