Dr. Martin Luther King appeared across my
mental screen today (4 April 2018) and delivered the following message:
My fellow Americans, I like and I do not like
what I see today, fifty years after my earthly sojourn came to untimely
termination.
I am astounded to bear witness to the progress
that this nation has made in sending forth people of talent into the realms of
collegiate education, private vocation, and public occupation. My eyes glisten with delight in seeing that
the populations of these realms preside regardless of gender, transgender,
ethnicity, or creed. The implications of
this sight, witnessed in Heaven and manifested on earth, gives testimony to the
most benevolent inclinations that abide in that particular representative of humanity
that dwells in the United States of America.
I discern, too, clearer skies, cleaner rivers,
and abundant places of beauty better protected than when I breathed, swam, and
sought solace in those verdant places, those natural spaces to which reverence
is owed because they are Divinely Bestowed.
But all of these beneficent developments are
currently besieged, impeded by consequential acts of commission and omission:
Committed are acts of the most lamentable
violence, against children, against young black men, against students thought
safely ensconced within school walls, against church folk gathered in a place
deemed by definition Godly, against bounteous but beleaguered Nature, against
the Other whose only offense is exhibiting difference in governmental
organization, religious dedication, or geographical location.
In observing such moral and physical
devastation we must remember the query posed by the eloquent anti-lynching
crusader Ida B. Wells-Barnett and ask ourselves again:
“What is the meaning of this hatred; what is the cause of this awful slaughter?”
The answer lies in our consequential acts of
omission.
Our wisdom must gain discovery in those
circumstances of history that we have too long ignored.
This is a great nation, thrust into the
international community as the first practitioner of Enlightenment ideals, with
a superlative Constitution, flawed but morally elevated via favorable amendment;
Frederick Douglass, Ms. Wells-Barnett,
A. Phillip Randolph, and I utilized this magnificent document to hold the American people to their
expressed ideals.
But too often those ideals have been betrayed,
indeed they have been vitiated since the very beginning, by the moral
abomination of plantation incarceration, Reconstruction deconstructed, Southern
justice obstructed, lives deducted, when the vigilante mob deemed that human
beings should hang from trees.
The nation for which I and those other
magnificent agents of life and liberty fought to advance was in fact only a
half-nation, stunted in its quest for full growth, existent as much in imagination
as in reality. For those ideals have
since the beginning been advanced for the benefit of a minority of the
population, observed mainly in the breech when women or African Americans
applied for citizenship, when certain immigrant populations yearned to breathe
free, or when Native Americans strove for a place in a world redefined for the
benefit of those who came late but aggrandized themselves early and often.
We must recover our momentum of righteousness,
that moral duty that I felt when I was on the throes of thrusting the Poor
People’s March into the national scene, just as my journey took an unplanned if
not entirely unexpected turn.
Left behind at the urban core, despite all of
the progress made by those with the wherewithal to grab for the professional
and suburban dream, is a restive population that has never attained anything like
an adequate education.
Very few in this nation gain that fullness of
knowledge that is their mutual cultural inheritance, bestowed by Divinity in
history and at the present, that great gift for creating a better future that
waits for us to claim with hands outstretched in gratitude.
We must create systems of public education
that impart knowledge and raise questions for dialectical resolution into moral
values that we all embrace and share in community.
This would make possible the achievement of my
grand goal in my earthly struggle.
Cycles of poverty would end.
People would vote in greater percentages and
more wisely.
Much less human activity would be wasted in
violence, more invested in acts of sibling kindness and generosity and love.
When I say that we must do these things I mean
that you now must do these things, that you must carry humanity to that next qualitative
level of which I, for all that I did achieve, have only dreamed.
Become the people of knowledge and morality that
you have the potential to become.
Create those systems of public education that
will allow all of God’s children to maximize their great human potential.
For this you will need courage.
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