Some thoughts on today’s holiday:
we were still blessed by Providence to have had him, because he was the right man at the right time. It was he who rose to be the leader and articulator and symbol of the civil-rights movement, a “dream deeply rooted in the American dream,” and not the loathsome racist Elijah Mohammed or the criminals of the Black Panther movement or even Malcolm X and his late embrace of mainstream Islam. Would any of these men, or the frauds and swindlers who claim to be “civil rights” spokesmen today, give a speech that ends this way?:
This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with a new meaning, “My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.”
And if America is to be a great nation this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!
Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!
Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California!
But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!
Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!
Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.
And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”
There is no one like him comparable today. He was a Republican for a reason. His modern heirs are leftists.
Amen, Reverend.
Sadly, we’re allowing others to forge chains of dependency, and have huge numbers of people willingly and happily putting on those chains.
Maybe I’m just privileged but I’ve always scoffed whenever I hear people talking about their boss “giving” them the day off. I actually cry a little whenever someone I know calls in to work pretending to be sick to get the day off. I’ve never asked, but I get the feeling that most of these people would take every day off if they could and it is only the threat that they might “lose” their job which causes them to go to work at all.
This baffles me. I’m proud to say that I enjoy my work – it is what I want to be doing with my time. When that stops being the case, and yes, infrequently I too need a day off, I inform those who are dependent upon my availability that I will not be available on that day. Typically this does not include public holidays or when I have the sniffles – I don’t work in an office, so there’s no risk of contagion.
I’ve never had an employer who disliked or disagreed with this policy..
No publishable comment.
I read his letter from the Birmingham Jail when I was a kid. Damn good writing and a powerful argument. He used the truth in the same way that Patton used tanks.
Always felts his “Why we can’t wait” was applicable to the problem of freedom and liberty in general — your once ever life must not be spent under tyranny.
His “I have a dream” speech was a masterpiece. Instead of using angry language (which would’ve been entirely justifiable), he spoke of a father’s dreams for his children. That speech, along with the peaceful protests, completely undermined any pretense of morality from those that discriminated against blacks and other minorities.
He learned it from Ghandi who learned it from Thoreau.
Any damned fool can learn from his own mistakes. Wisdom is learning from the mistakes of others.
In this case, it doesn’t matter that Dr. King and the civil rights movement weren’t the first to adopt the policy of non-violent protest. They were wise enough to know non-violence in the face of racial hostility and violence gave them the moral high ground.
Who said it did? Learning from history and the lives of others? You’re preaching to the choir, Larry…