Martin Luther King Jr. left a vast legacy for the movement he personified and the nation he loved. But he left more—King left us a vision of America where there is no gap between the words of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence and the actions of both powerful leaders and everyday citizens.

Twenty-one years ago, on January 20, 1986, the first national Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday was observed.

Today members of Dr. King’s “beloved community” keep his dream alive by giving meaning to his life and legacy, and by commemorating the values he taught and embodied, the vision he inspired and the contributions he made.

Thanks to that same community, we have so far managed to resist treating King’s holiday as merely another day off of work on which to do some shopping. According to the King Center website, this holiday is observed in more than 100 nations as a day of education, training, interracial cooperation and community service.

Still, as an educator I have learned that for many of us King is largely a name like Washington or Kennedy, a figure whose life and legacy is known superficially, a kind of social and cultural sound bite from our past.

I regularly teach a university course in which King is one of several figures, along with Gandhi, Elie Wiesel and Dorothy Day, students study as they contemplate the ongoing need for peace in the world. I often ask students, If King were still alive (he’d be 78), what issues do you think he’d take on? Many suggest King would be bridging the gap between rich and poor, relentlessly fighting against prejudice and racism and overcoming the pandemic of AIDS. And, without a doubt, King would be deeply concerned about terrorism and U.S. involvement in Iraq.

Clearly, the war in Iraq is in many ways different from the war about which King increasingly spoke out against in the final years of his life. In April of 1967, one year before his death and three years after U.S. troops moved substantially into Vietnam, King followed his conscience and, against the advice of many in the civil rights movement, brought the war “into the field of [his] moral vision.”

Nearly four years into the present war in Iraq, King’s speech has relevance for us today, not only for the way the two conflicts are similar, but for how it sets forth King’s vision for America as more urgent than ever.

Entitled “Beyond Vietnam,” King noted the way the war in Vietnam diverted resources from critical needs at home, took a disproportionate toll on blacks and the poor while asking them to guarantee for others what they did not yet realize in Harlem or Georgia, and proffered violence as a means for solving problems in a way that risked poisoning the soul of America. Speaking of the Vietnamese, King offered an insight hauntingly echoed today: “They must,” he said, “see Americans as strange liberators.”

King’s feared tomorrow is our today. For all the reasons to object to the war in Iraq, it is, as King said of Vietnam, more importantly “a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit,” a spirit shackled by an inability to understand “those who have been designated as our enemies” and thus blinded from seeing “the basic weaknesses of our own condition.”

Despite false assertions to the contrary, King spoke as one who loved America, calling for “a radical revolution of values” as the means for preventing the “spiritual death” of his beloved nation. As a Christian minister, King also spoke of the conflict that the war presented to a faith characterized by love of enemy and a sense of calling that increasingly took him beyond loyalties to race or nation or creed.

On the 21st anniversary of this holiday, most would affirm King’s ideal of America in overcoming poverty and racism and advancing equality, justice and freedom. However, we have not yet fully understood that King’s vision cannot be achieved without realizing how our penchant for settling differences militarily is connected to our materialism and a nationalism that King would replace by “an overriding loyalty to [hu]mankind as a whole.”

Even as scenarios for Iraq are debated, some 40 years later King proclaims that love and nonviolence are still the answer. As he said then about communism, it may be our best defense against terrorism “If we will but make the right choice, we will be able to speed up the day, all over America and all over the world, when justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.” Such thoughts take us beyond Iraq.