A King Struck Down By Hate

Each morning after I contemplate the world outside the window wall by my desk my focus shifts to reviewing Internet news sources for a hour or so. Again this year it was unsettling but not unexpected to find little more than passing mention one of the most significant events in our national history. That event was the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968.

That year American society was already divided over our involvement in the Vietnam War. King's assassination, and that of Robert Kennedy two months later, widened that divide and pushed domestic instability on several fronts to unheard of levels in our lifetime. Much of the anger, distrust, and uncertainty rising out of that era has been simmering ever since. As a people we pay a huge price for focusing on what divides us rather than on what unites us. The erosion of political discourse since 2000 is a daily reminder of that cost.

Today the erosion accelerates when a zealous, hate-filled prosecutor indicts a former president with a felony crime that ordinarily would be a misdeanor offense for virtually all other Americans. The leftist mob cheers this indictment. At the same time it ignores the precedent it sets and the national consequences sure to follow when the opposition party assumes executive power and a legislative majority, both likely near-term events.

I doubt our Founding Fathers ever expected the American experience they created to be an easy one to maintain. We're certainly proving that today. Furthermore, I doubt they expected it to evolve outside the freedoms they enshrined in a republic and its rule by law. Much of what King did, much of what he said about equality and peaceful change, operated within that context. Although there is much debate on whether or not he would have maintained that posture had he lived, his legacy lives on to help us perfect our union. We should take the time to stop talking and listen before our unique experiment enboldened by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution can no longer be sustained. We can only imagine how pleased King would be were we to focus on reconciliation in the pursuit of freedom, equality, and justice.

More about this day, the man, and his legacy can be found at the Lorraine Motel/National Civil Rights Museum website, the King Center website, and that of the Martin Luther King National Historical Park.






Sources

Photos and Illustrations:
Public domain photo, Nobel Foundation (http://nobelprize.org/) and Wikimedia Commons