HAPPY DR. KING DAY!

Paging Dr. King

I'm almost glad that Dr. King did not live to see his ninetieth birthday last week. The America of January 21, 2019 would have broken the good reverend's heart. Could he have imagined that, in the space of fifty years after his passing, we would go from Lyndon Johnson to Donald Trump? What would he have made of it all? It's a pretty safe bet that he would not have been pleased. The tumultuous times in which he lived are kind of low rent compared to today. I lived through both periods. As unsettling as things were to the ten-year-old boy that I was in 1968. I never thought for a second that I was witnessing the end times of America. Today I'm not so sure.

With the election of Barack Obama in 2008, commentators began to speak of "a post racial America". Within months of his inauguration that phrase all-but disappeared. The reaction by a significant minority of Americans to their first black president would have, I'm certain, broken Dr. King's heart. While we have come a long way in many respects, we haven't come very far at all. Trump's residency in the White House is all the proof we need to lay that fallacy low. The fact that a known white supremacist, Stephen Miller, is writing policy is all we need to know that the societal curse that Martin Luther King died fighting is still very much alive.

The memory of where I was the moment the news came over the car radio that Dr. King had been murdered in Memphis is as clear today as it was a week later. We were coming back from a long-defunct shopping center in Middletown, New York called Lloyds. My late mother was driving in the east-bound lane of Route 17 - known by locals as the "Quickway". We were just approaching Exit 122, the Fletcher Street exit where the local Catholic high school sits opposite. We were heading up the ramp when the announcement was flashed to the world. Being a mere nine-years old on April 4, 1968, I had only a vague knowledge of who Martin Luther King was. I would learn a lot more in the days that followed. This was the event that turned me into a newspaper reader. The assassination of Robert F. Kennedy two months later only hardened my resolve to try and stay on top of things. If you're not old enough to remember, 1968 was that kind of year in America - not terribly different from 2019. In fact, I'm willing to make the argument that these times are far worse. Back then, it was only an occasional politician or civil rights leader being gunned down. Today it's whole classrooms of kids.

 

"A nation that continues, year after year, to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
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Well, what the hey! It appears to me that the good doctor was onto something there! In fact, we're way beyond "approaching spiritual doom", we're there, baby! Take a good look around you. This ain't your father's America. It's not even close. Paging Dr. King indeed.

"If we assume that mankind has the right to exist, then we must find an alternative to war and destruction. In our day of space vehicles and guided ballistic missiles, the choice is either nonviolence or nonexistence."

That's what I love about this guy! American history is littered with "Christian" religious leaders. Try as you might, you can't escape them. The thing that sets the right, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. apart from most of these guys is the fact that he wasn't a hypocrite. He never tried to twist the words of Jesus of Nazareth into anything other than what they were - a call to love one another and for kindness and gentleness. The Trappist monk Thomas Merton is another celebrated American Christian who took the gospel seriously. So was Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker. Give me a week and I might be able to name one or two others, but at the moment none come to mind. Both Merton and King died in 1968. Dorothy Day left this veil of tears in 1980. They're gone and they're not coming back.

I'm going to celebrate today by getting hopelessly drunk. I'm an American. That's what we do!

 

From every mountainside, let freedom ring!

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And if America is to be a great nation, this must be true.

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And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire!

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Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York!

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Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!

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Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado!

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Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California!

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But not only that -

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Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!

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Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!

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Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi!

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From every mountainside, Let Freedom ring!

It doesn't get any better than that.

Happy Dr. King Day, everybody!

Tom Degan
Goshen, NY

 

BREAKING NEWS!

The Trump White House has no events marking Dr. King Day. Of course, they need to appease "the base".

 

SUGGESTED READING:

Let the Trumpet Sound
by Stephen B. Oates

This is the only biography I have ever read about Dr. King, but it's a good one. Very much recommended.
  

The greatest Americans had mug shots!