The Wrongologist

What’s Wrong Today

We could talk about a host of things that are wrong, starting with Senators McCain & Graham Thanking America Last with their continuing wrongheadedness about Libya, (how is it possible for two Senators to be on every side of this issue, and always be wrong? 

But for today, let’s talk about something that is right: The New York Times reported today on the opening of the Martin Luther King Memorial on the Mall in DC. The Memorial opened on Monday after 20+ years of planning, but still about $5 million short of the funds required for its construction. It will be formally dedicated on Sunday, the 48^th anniversary of MLK’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech.

President Obama will lead the dedication ceremony, providing neat symbolism for a nation that often can’t get its symbolism right.

(Phillip Scott Andrews/The New York Times)

The Sculpture draws its inspiration from a line in the Dream Speech:  “With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope”

Ask a person under 25 about MLK and they will say things like: “He made the ‘I have a dream’ speech? I heard it in school’; or, “He made things better in the US”; or, “He fought for black rights”.

Well, he did all of those things kids, and so much more. I lived through the 1950’s and 1960’s and MLK transformed America. In the ‘50’s the US was a place where no one questioned why we did things the way we did, we just followed whatever our parents did. By the end of the ‘60’s we had questioned everything, changed a few things and many of us were living under a very different set of social mores than those of our parents.

For me, the end of the 1950’s came with the civil rights movement. MLK, others in our churches and some courageous few politicians created a real “moral majority” (not the phony idea espoused by Jerry Falwell 25 years later), of people of all races, educational and economic strata who came together to support the Big Idea that Separate was not Equal. MLK went big, giving a voice to the Big Idea. His presence, power and persuasiveness drove our political process to a place and to an outcome in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that was completely unthinkable in 1954 when Brown vs. Board of Education was decided by the Supreme Court. LBJ helped, too.

I participated in the Civil Rights movement from 1958 to 1962. My participation changed me, shaping my viewpoint on race, religion and politics. I left active participation in the movement believing good ideas and a morally sound position would, if properly promulgated, create change through our political process.

I was an officer in the US Army running a nuclear missile unit in Germany when MLK was killed in 1968. We had several tense days, despite the fact that the Army was ahead of the country at that point, integrated and in some ways, a meritocracy blind to race.

MLK remains the hero of a generation of Americans for whom activism was a building block of their personal journey to adulthood. In most ways, our nation has not recovered that sense of can-do, or that all things are possible for your Big Idea, because sadly, today we have no one who can rally us to drive Big Ideas to reality.

Still, 48 years later, we have not yet completely erased our race-related issues, except on TV, where every day,  commercials show people of all races having fun together while shopping for their next fast food meal.

Let’s hope that it becomes a reality outside of TV before too many more MLK days come and go by.