After MLK

Little more than a week after gun violence killed a federal judge and five citizens and severely wounded a member of Congress, we have a national holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr., shot and killed at the age of 39. Weeks later, Bobby Kennedy was shot and killed at the age of 43, while running for President. It only takes a glance at, for example, this collection of quotes from MLK to see how far--and how much farther away--we are from becoming the country and the society MLK envisioned. His words may as well come from Mars, they are so far from today's public dialogue. The prevailing attitudes about guns is one depressing indication, but the militarization of spirit is evident throughout. MLK's words--beacons of hope in their time, inspiring action--are today considered heavenly idealism, with genuflection and bows of the head as the response, rather than consideration or determination.

Just about the only positive that can be noted is expressed in the photo above, one of my favorites of the past several years which I've been looking for an excuse to publish. You can read all American history, and particularly the decades from the 1960s to 2008, in Sidney Poiter's face as he embraces President Barack Obama. It was a political outcome only someone with the vision of MLK could have imagined in the 1960s.

But while racial justice was the cause of his life, it was not the limit of his concerns or his vision. Both he and Robert Kennedy had visions of a better America--not just better in some absolute idealistic moral and political sense, but better because the times demanded it. To meet the challenges of their present and their future--which is our present and onrushing future--they knew what was required. It's easy to miss the progress we've made in certain areas. But in others we not only haven't moved forward, we're sliding back dangerously. If we measure 2010 against MLK's words, that sobering conclusion becomes hard to avoid.