I’d like to be serious.
I think the times demand it.
Monday, Jan. 16, is a holiday. It is more than just a day off from work or school. It is the day we honor the life and achievements of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King.
But even more than that, it is a day for us to ponder what we are and who we are as a nation.
King believed were are one nation, that we are, as he put it, “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality,” that we must strive to be good neighbors. “The good neighbor looks beyond the external accidents and discerns those inner qualities that make all men human and, therefore, brothers,” King said.
King lived for that belief.
King died for that belief.
Through his life’s work, and with an eloquence matched only by Abraham Lincoln, King showed us the way to the true America.
We’re not there yet. But, getting there is the real American Dream.
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It is the dream King meant on that August day in 1963 when he ended his great “I have a dream” speech with this vision of and for our country:
“… 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.'”
But, times change and yet times stay the same.
On the one hand we have made progress toward achieving King’s dream.
But, on the other hand we have invented more ways to build walls between people. We have come up with a new “Other” to exclude, to look upon as different and thus to be distrusted and feared.
This would sadden King, who without a doubt would include Muslims among those with whom we all “will be able to join hands.”
We Americans describe ourselves as e pluribus unum – one people from many peoples.
This is the America King showed us – not just told us, but showed us by his life and work.
Believing in and living e pluribus unum is the way to honor King and to honor the ideals of our country.
Paul Sassone is a freelance columnist for Pioneer Press.