Weary Dreams

Weary Dreams

MLKDay14Today is one of the most important benchmarks in the American calendar, the Martin Luther King federal holiday. It’s especially important this year, the 50th anniversary of King’s famous “I Have a Dream!

” speech.

Yet in America over the past year King’s dreams have retreated into the fog of self-righteousness. His detractors, America’s Right, has rolled back many of the voting freedoms he had fought for a half century ago, assisted by a conservative if vindictive Supreme Court.

And King’s supporters seem to have hunkered down and conceded defeat. As America wiggles slowly out of a Great Recession there is less and less stomach for fighting.

And this seems true around the world. In Africa the “Arab Spring” and “Twevolution” are fizzling out.

African dictators are on the ascent, again. Oppressive laws are raising their ugly heads.

Africa, and America, are weary. War weary and poor weary.

Dr. King is ascribed in history — like Ghandi — as a champion of non-violence. But what I most remember of King’s turbulent last days was unbelievable violence. My most vivid memory is as a very young journalist penned under a burning El Stop in downtown Chicago while the city raged in reaction to King’s assassination.

I remember gun fire was a regular sound in my low-rent apartment in Washington, D.C. during the summer of 1968. Or the unending sirens and tear gas around my apartment in Berkeley that fall.

Those days ended in victory for my side. The Vietnam War came to an end. Civil Rights and Voting Rights leaped forward. There is much violence in America, today, but it seems to occur without a cause.

Gun violence in America is horrific, today. While the number of households with guns has been declining, the actual number of guns has been skyrocketing. There are now almost a quarter billion guns in private citizen hands and countless murders daily.

This is not what Dr. King had in mind. So today we celebrate his 85th birthday, wishing sorely that he were still here to explain.

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