A Great Beacon Light of Hope
While out for a drive this evening, a radio station played Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech from the March on Washington in 1963 in honor of his birthday today. The text is good but obviously King’s elocution and the crowd response add to the speech. Video is available on YouTube. I think it is worth listening to the whole 17 minute speech, but here are a couple great lines to peak your interest.
We have also come to his hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.
Barack Obama has been referring to the “urgency of now” lately. It is one of a dozen great phrases in this speech. At 45 years old, this speech highlights how far this nation has come, but also how much there is left to to do to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.
I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.
Let us not wallow in the valley of despair. I say to you today my friends - so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
After listening to this speech I’d like to be hopeful, but it seems unwise to refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt against such a preponderance of contrary evidence.
links & politics posted by: dan @ 16 Jan 2008 1:41