IN REMEMBRANCE: MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

This breaks my heart. Lest WE forget Martin's last days, and his last campaign.

Have we lost our sense of history? Shall we not remember the struggles and the progress achieved by acts of individual moral courage, the greatness that was reluctantly accepted and then embraced, the sacrifices consciously made and the lesson hard-learned that "one man/woman CAN make a difference"?

We are a Southern white upper-middle-class family. We have two sons, three daughters. The only real role model of the modern age that we (The Sage and I) knew how to introduce to our children was Martin. We have loved others -- Bobby, John, Jimmy, The Big Dog -- but it was Martin who inspired us, who represented the best blend of our own personal values of religious faith, progressivism, and populism, and articulated a vision for the future that, requiring the best in us, promised a utopian Christ-like result, whether here on earth or in the hereafter, if we would only be true to the ideal. In a pragmatic world, it is almost a miracle to discover a realist who also could have the courage to say, "IF then you will do, THEN this will be the result." We have, as a people, failed to believe in and execute Martin's vision. So have we Christ's, from which Martin's derived. The poorer we.

And it was Martin who engaged and inspired the hearts and minds of our children, just as he did our own when we were youths. We shared, and still share, his dream. We have seen the mountaintop through his eyes, we have tasted the glory of his vision. He never pretended to be, or presented himself as, a holy man to be worshipped. He merely spoke the faith of his fathers, the faith that drove his life and purpose, the faith that sustained him in the Birmingham jail. It is our faith, and it sustains us still. But Martin lived it in a way that we have never been challenged to -- we have never faced death for our beliefs or our actions. This is America, right? It was also Martin's America -- and he died knowing, like Moses, that he most likely would never see the culmination of his life's work but believed that all that really mattered was pleasing the Lord God and helping the poor, oppressed, afflicted and downtrodden in His name.

The Pope has died, and John Paul II did many good things in his life, including demonstrating a courageous outspokenness that contributed to the fall of communism in eastern Europe. Let us not, this week of the anniversary of his death, neglect to thank God for Martin's life or, if you choose, just remember his tremendous contributions to our nation and especially the
soul of our people.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
...
And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:

                Free at last! free at last!

                Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

Thanks to PSOTD (About Politics), who consistently brings to our attention important, but almost unnoticed, information -- and reminders of who we are and how we got here.