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It Was The Hope Of The
World
Remembering Martin Luther
King, Jr. and Others
By
Mark A. Goldman
19/01/08 "ICH'
--- - In honor of Martin Luther King I am not going to speak
directly about his dream or his sacrifice.
His contribution and the
contribution of all who helped make him what he was—which is to
say, all those who marched, boycotted, broke the rules, sat at
lunch counters and on buses, got dog bit, hand cuffed, fire
hosed, jailed and billy clubbed so that he might have a platform
on which to speak—cannot be properly honored with fancy words or
platitudes.
I will not offer praise
either... for the same reason that I sometimes feel slightly
unsettled when I hear people say, “Praise the Lord,” as if
praise is really what God was hoping for.
The movement that provided King
the platform from which he so eloquently spoke, made great
strides under his leadership, and did so in the face of terrible
odds. One of King’s most important victories was having both the
consciousness to recognize and the courage to then proclaim,
that all people—not only Americans—are entitled to basic human
rights, compassion, and respect. Today, remembering King, we are
grateful for what he, and those who marched shoulder to shoulder
with him, stood for… and what they stood against.
But alas, history reminds us
that the fruits of victory which are won even with enormous
sacrifice—which is how our freedoms were won—are not guaranteed
to last forever. The will to dominate, and other aspects of
human depravity, somehow show up time and again just like
hunger, poverty, and injustice do even in the midst of plenty
and in the face of what we call progress.
At the close of the
Constitutional Convention of 1787, when a woman asked Ben
Franklin what kind of government had just been created, he
replied, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.” That
republic was only the skeleton of an idea—a promise— that
Franklin knew could only be fulfilled and then periodically
renewed by future generations.
A longing for universal peace,
justice and freedom has been incubating in the human soul for as
long as there is memory. Even the birth of our nation, in
pursuit of those goals, had to wait eons for its time to come.
It was the hope of the world.
Now fast-forward two centuries.
In just a blink of an eye we have seen many rights and freedoms
that were once secured and later defended through the sacrifice
of untold quantities of blood… and supposedly etched, as if in
stone, into the hearts and minds of our countrymen… fade… as if
those promises were written onto our sacred document in
time-delayed invisible ink.
We have now suffered through two
consecutive fraudulent
national elections that installed a would-be king to the
presidency— a man who calls the document on which The Great Idea
of our republic is inscribed,“…just
a goddamn piece of paper.”
And what is left of that "
goddamn piece of paper” which, for over two centuries, was the
glue that held our nation together and united us as a people?...
All of this made possible by
public servants and citizens too, who behave as if they never
read a book, visited a museum, went to school, took an oath, or
pledged allegiance. The ship of state is lost at sea, captained
by a would-be king, and attended to by painted courtesans, all
busy defending their lust for power and feigning innocence with
platitudes and half-truths.
Their handiwork has left behind
a multitude of dead bodies, still uncounted. The murdered, the
dispossessed, the mind-damaged, and the broken-bodied suffering
souls remind us that something evil has been going on in our
name that we don't understand… something that by official decree
we are forbidden to understand. We are faintly aware that
something has been stolen from us and our progeny, the full
accounting of which, is locked up, hidden away, and beyond our
reach—like the papers of past and future presidents are locked
away… until they are dead and gone and so are we.
Lies, deceit and fear hang in
the air like the exhaust of half a billion oil burning engines,
and squinting through the stifling smog—we finally open our eyes
and ask ourselves, “My goodness, I’ve lost track of time…what
time is it… look over there through the haze… does that look to
you like a rising sun or a setting sun?”
And then as if from some distant
past, we hear a voice answer, “I guess that will depend now
on how you honor your dead, and what you intend to leave to your
posterity.”
For
information about Mark A. Goldman's books, click
http://www.gpln.com/commentary.htm#books
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