…why you won’t be getting any snail-mail today:
If you’ve never heard the entire speech, you owe it to yourself to watch this clip. It’s a little long, but it’s powerful stuff. And it’s quintessentially American: injustice identified and loudly denounced, over and over, until change is wrought. This is what I was talking about last night, the progressive spirit of the early ’60s that among many other, far more important things, fueled the philosophy behind a little TV show I grew up loving. I admire it. In my cynicism, I can’t help but wonder if it’s still there somewhere in the American character, just sleeping, or if it’s been washed away by complacency and fear and all the shiny baubles that distract us. I also wonder what Dr. King would think of this brave new world of the 21st century. Have we come far enough yet on matters of race to satisfy him? How would he have reacted to 9/11? Would he have spoken out against the horrors of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo? And would people still listen if he had?
I think the progressive spirit still lies very much in the American psyche, we just aren’t unified on how to progress to achieve similar visions. I’ll blame that on gross bi-partisanship.
It’s extremely unfortunate that we don’t have MLK in this day and age. Instead, we have Al Sharptons, Jesse Jacksons and Spike Lees. All three in which I believe, do a great dissatisfaction to the racial causes MLK faught for as well as separate race, rather than fight to unify it.
Hard to say what MLK would think of today’s world. I can’t imagine JFK thinking it was any more improved though, either.
I absolutely agree with you, Cheno — a historical first for us when it comes to political matters! 🙂
I’m with you, though — people like Sharpton and and Jackson and Spike Lee have done little to further Dr. King’s dream of a fully integrated society where skin color is utterly irrelevant. In fact, I think you can argue that we’ve actually gone backwards on race in this country because we’ve gotten bogged down in arguments over semantics (i.e., the “n-word” and whether people are “black” or “African-American”) rather than talking about the real substance of race. Everyone is so worried about offending people of other races that no one really talks to each other at all, at least not about anything that might be controversial. When I watch movies made in the early ’70s, I’m always shocked at how much more honest they appear to be than the stuff that comes out now. Think about something like Blazing Saddles, for instance; no way in hell you could make that film today.
I grew up thinking that there weren’t African-Americans, Asian-Americans, etc., there were only Americans. My mom proudly tells of how when I was a small child, I got angry because I overheard someone call Gordon from Sesame Street black; in my mind, he wasn’t “black,” he was just Gordon. And I never saw any substantive difference between Lando Calrissian and Han Solo — they were both cool, and Leia obviously thought they were both worthy of her interest. I’d still like it to be that way, but seeing things with my adult eyes, it’s obvious we’re a long way away from that place.
I suspect Dr. King and both Kennedy brothers would be pretty disappointed with how things have developed. But that’s history, I guess.