Rothko Chapel - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Sound Installation
Source: rothkochapel.org I came around the corner of the Rothko Chapel in Houston by way of the meditation park that abuts the chapel. From speakers set up outside, I could hear the beginning of Dr. King’s address Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence , delivered April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in New York City. You can download a pdf from the Civil Rights Archive here . Visiting the chapel is always a balm for me. Today was especially necessary. Every year, I give some thought over to and meditate on Dr. King’s lessons and example. Today, however, was more of the moment. Today, Dr. King’s words are more necessary than ever and his address on U.S. involvement in Vietnam may hold more relevance for us than ever. He touches on aspects of, not just America’s disastrous, imperialist foreign policy, but something more innate to the nation. He found “[t]he war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit” and what followed was a list of elemen...