King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech just as important today
“We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence.” (I don’t care if you’re an armed Trump supporter hell-bent on hanging Mike Pence, or an Antifa lunatic who wants to turn America into a communist paradise: Quit it with the violence and destruction. All it’s doing is hardening the other side. It is doing nothing to move the needle with the majority of us who would never raise a fist …)
Monday was Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech was probably be referenced a billion times.
It’s probably worth listening to the 17-minute speech in its entirety, as I just did for the first time ever. Now obviously, the speech was about the plight of Black people in America, and we clearly haven’t come to a place where Dr. King would be like, “There. We did it.”
But listening to the speech, I couldn’t help but think so much of what he said - while still entirely too appropriate in the Black Lives Matter era - are also eerily appropriate in the current political climate.
Believe me, I’m not trying to appropriate his speech for other means. I’ll be the first to say we still have a ton of work to do in this country when it comes to race relations. But good golly, was this man brilliant. We could all use a little Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. today, Black, white, or other.
This speech was given nearly 57 years ago. It is as relevant today as it was then, for the same reasons in many cases, for different reasons in many cases. I’m going to pull four quotes from the speech below with some limited commentary. These are words we all - no matter where you fall on the political spectrum hear right now.
“We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence.” (I don’t care if you’re an armed Trump supporter hell-bent on hanging Mike Pence, or an Antifa lunatic who wants to turn America into a communist paradise: Quit it with the violence and destruction. All it’s doing is hardening the other side. It is doing nothing to move the needle with the majority of us who would never raise a fist …)
“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.” (Well, not much to
- need to say about this one, eh? Might be the greatest 60 words of the 20th century, if not all-time ...)
“This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning: My country, ‘tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrims’ pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.” (If you’ve got little kids like me, it’s been a bear trying to explain to them what happened at the Capitol, what happened during the BLM marches, what happened to George Floyd, what happened in the election, and on and on. These kids listen. They know. And it’s up to us to have to explain something we have no explanation for. My parents didn’t have to deal with this in the 1980s. We do. It sucks ...)
“And when this happens, and 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.”
(I have even less to say about this one. My goodness, what a message. And don’t you dare tell me I’m naive to believe it.
We need to remember we are all Americans, and all the backbiting we’ve been doing in these last few years only hinders our growth as a nation and as a people. Enough with the bull, in short. That goes for every last one of us.)