Today, I had the privilege of listening to Dr. Martin Luther King's "I have a Dream Speech" in its entirety. I must admit, its not something I set out to do; it was, rather, a happy accident. I was tuned in as normal to NPR on the raido in my car, and some show (Talk of the Nation?) was good enough to air the speech in its entirety. It was my good fortunte to hear every word as I drove from my home to the CHKD Thrift Store, where my wife and I were going to buy some stuff we did not need anymore.
As many years as I have been alive, and as much as we talk about Dr. King's Speech, I realized as I was listening that I have never really heard it, that I have never even read it. If you find yourself thinking "you know, I have never really heard it either", do yourself a favor and do so through your medium of choice.
It is an amazing speech, made all the more amazing becuase (as I later learned), the most famous part of the speech, the "I have a dream"s, was not written down. It something that Dr. King was apparently thinking about as he was crafting the speech, but it hadn't made it into the final cut. But as he was giving his address he decided to abandon his prepared text and launched into something that has captured the heart of a nation for the past 47 years.
I was just about moved to tears. Here is a man who is inspiring America to fulfil its promise not with hate but with love, not with a fist but with an open hand, not with denigration of his opponents but rather with a hope that one day we all might see past our differences and unite in a meaningful way.
And I ask myself: where is our Dr. King? Who is inspiring us to be our best selves with an open hand? Is it the Glenn Beck's or the John Stewart's? Is it the Sarah Palins? Is it the Keith Obermans? Is it even the Barak Obamas of this world? Where is our country's champion?
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