Martin Luther King, Jr., more than 50 years after his death, is still remembered primarily for his "I Have a Dream Speech," the one sermon of his that the majority of whites find palatable. (Most white people like myself, just don't get it, and would even get defensive over King's words in the above NBC news clip from 1968.) A friend of mine, looking at a book I owned of King's most famous sermons called Strength To Love, observed sadly, "He had a lot of dreams that didn't come true."
Dr. King believed in the "Beloved Community" where poverty, hunger and homelessness would be non-existent. Where education, healthcare and and economic stability were treated as human rights. Where people of all races, religions, nationalities and creeds would be respected, loved and treated with human dignity. Not in some delayed paradise in the sky after we die, but here, now, in our reality, our world, our lifetimes.
Fifty years later, we have political leaders who want to dismantle everything MLK and others fought for. All the rights King and other non-violent revolutionaries endured jail, beatings, hoses and attack dogs to see given the force of law. Political leaders from the halls of power implementing racially charged gerrymandering and gutting the Voting Rights Act.
And for the love of God, what would King think of an illegitimate president shutting down the government, hurting public employees living paycheck to paycheck and letting our national parks go to waste because he wants to build a wall to keep people out? What do we look like when the leader of our nation and the so-called free world cruelly separates infants, toddlers and small children from parents seeking asylum at the U.S. border? A president who befriends cruel dictators, who refused to condemn the racism of violent hatemongers and a murderers in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017?
I dislike people who put up walls. My heroes are those who break down walls. The walls of segregation, racism, injustice, hatred...King broke down walls and built bridges of peace, brotherhood, equality. We've taken terrible steps back toward making American racism acceptable again, but look at what we've gained -- an African American woman, California Sen. Kamala Harris running for President, a Massachusetts Senator of Native American descent, Elizabeth Warren running for President, Muslim women -- Rashida Tlaib and Illhan Omar being elected to Congress. Deb Halland, of the Laguna Pueblo tribe became one of the first Native American women elected to Congress and the other -- who could have ever seen the day when a Democratic Native American (Ho-Chunk tribe) lesbian woman, Sharice Davids, would be elected to Congress from Kansas?
The times are changing and all you backwards people who support the wall, discriminating against immigrants, tearing apart families (like they did in the antebellum South and Nazi Germany), removing anti-lynching protections for LGBT people, in short Trump and all the ugly things he stands for can truck with the segregationists, McCarthyites, dixiecrats, Klansmen, Bull Connors and J. Edgar Hoovers of yesterday because you are right there with them on the dead wrong end of history. Your world is finished. 2019 is a year for passion!
King dared to dream of a day when black men, white men, Jews, Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics would join hands in singing the negro spiritual "Free at Last." If MLK were speaking today, he would probably say whites, indigenous peoples, blacks, gays, straights, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists would join as one.
The people who want to hold back time can say we can't accommodate refugees. "We have to take care of our own house." Well it's not an either/or, it's an all. King realized that we lived in a "world house." In one of my favorite of his sermons, "Who is My Neighbor?" Dr. King drew on Jesus's parable of The Good Samaritan, a man from a tribe of people universally hated by ancient Hebrews who aided a beaten and robbed man left naked and for dead, cared for him, clothed him and set him up in an inn and even went back the next day to check if he was all right. What Jesus was saying in the First Century and King in the 20th, is that we are all neighbors and we all have a responsibility to be our brother's keeper.
I can see the Promised Land, the beloved community, maybe even a day when people say, "You know this war stuff is stupid. Let's stop it." There are going to be setbacks and people like Trump, Pence, McConnell and Cruz who will try to impede progress at every turn because, as King observed, power never relinquishes voluntarily, but we're gonna get there.