Today is the day we honor Martin Luther King, Jr, whose Jan 15th birthday this year would have been his 86th.
May history record that someday soon we enacted policies that honor, rather than corrupt the legacy of this man. At present, that honor exists only in name, while we press on with actions in his name that work to undo much of his sh9rtened life's work.
While MLK hoped to realize his famous dream that his children would be judged 'by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin" our self-indulgent societal elites have worked against that dream ever bearing fruit.
We have taken MLK's dream of a color-blind society and substituted a politically correct, multicultural tribalism where racial identity is not just an issue, but the only perpetual issue. Colleges have entire courses of study dedicated to understanding how a person's race causes them to experience life differently. We not openly embrace discrimination on the basis of race in government contracts, college admissions, and all the hundreds of little transactions influenced by a desire to appear appropriately "diverse."
While MLK sounded again the theme of what binds us together in common-- a frequent theme of JFK's public remarks-- our popular culture wants to focus on what makes us different. Charlatans like Al Sharpton inflame racial tensions for personal power and profit. Politicians sew seeds of discord and strife to bear the cynical fruit of their own power and wealth.
Left behind, stripped of dignity and opportunity, are those in whose name the do-gooders ostensibly enacted their misguided policies. Fifty years of urban renewal and welfare expansion of left them with less opportunity and more dysfunction than ever before.
May it not be enduringly so, and a new birth of freedom set right what the schemes of men laid wrong.
