I am happy to join with you today in fond remembrance of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I was born just one year after Dr. King was abruptly taken from this Earth. Three score years ago, this great American, in whose symbolic shadow we all stand today, marched bravely through the streets of rural Alabama in the famous Montgomery bus boycotts. He stood up for a woman who refused to stand so that we could all someday stand as one.
But sixty years later we would appear to be just as divided as ever. Sixty years later our prison system is blacker than ever. We see images on our televisions of white police officers choking an unarmed black man to death and we see young black men gunning down other police officers in retaliation.
We refuse to see that we are growing morally bankrupt as a society. Each side blindly points to the other as the sole reason for these problems. Politicians attempt to racially divide us in order to gain political advantage. Both blacks and whites appear to be unwilling to look into their own mirror for a solution.
I call on all of you in America today to recognize the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of procrastination. These problems will not fix themselves over the next few election cycles. We have far too many enemies around the world for us to continue being enemies to each other. Now is the time to make real the promises of past generations. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of racial division to the sunlit valley of racial unity. Now is the time to teach the lesson of unconditional love and acceptance to all of God’s children.
It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of this moment. Two thousand and fifteen is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the people who rioted in Ferguson just needed to blow off some steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until all its citizens are treated equally without prejudice in the eyes of the law. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of true justice emerges.
But this is a message not only for those who fight against our cause. This is an urgent message for those currently engaged on our side of the struggle. In the process of gaining your rightful place, you must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Do not satisfy your thirst for justice by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. We must always hold ourselves to the very highest standards of morality.
We will not win this struggle by continuing to refer to our friends by the same hurtful names that our enemies use to degrade us. We will find it difficult to keep our heads held high if we cannot even keep our pants held up. We will lose this fight if we don’t hold all of our women in the same high regard that we would hold our own mothers and sisters. We must reject the pop culture message of misogyny and bravado and we must once again embrace God’s message of love and decency. Today, we must become the fathers that our children so desperately need.
We have been engulfed by a growing militarized police state, but this must not lead us to distrust an entire race of people. Some of us may be unfairly profiled and treated with prejudice from time to time but we will not be divided. The fate of white and black America is inextricably bound. We will rise or fall as one.
Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.
And 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.”
I have a dream that we will someday elect and support politicians not because they look like us but because they think as we do.
I have a dream that our old and outdated words of hate will someday be a distant memory in the vocabulary of our nation’s history.
I still have a dream that our children will live in a nation where they will be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today.
Rest in peace, Dr. King. Your dream still lives in me.
I have spent the past few years wishing that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were still alive and here with us. This broken nation needs him now more that ever. I recently decided to study some of his old speeches both for content and for cadence to see if I could get some idea of what Dr. King would sound like today. I do not want to create any kind of impression that I am actually speaking for Dr. King. The speech that I have included in this post today is about 50 percent Dr. King’s own words and 50 percent my own. This is my own personal interpretation of what I believe MLK would sound like today. This is not meant to offend anyone but my hope is that this will allow all of us to reflect for a moment on what Martin Luther King’s message would mean to us in today’s world.
Michael,
As a fellow Hendrix alum, its nice to see some good folks out there spreading the good word. Thanks for writing. I see a lot of similarities in our worldview. I spend a great deal of my free time reading about and watching trends in the commodity, equity, fixed income, and FX markets so it is nice to read the thoughts of other ordinary Americans on these subjects. 99 out of 100 people look at me like an alien when I try to discuss these matters.
In regard to Dr. King, my revelation of 2015 is that the next leaders of the next page in the civil rights movement must be of many different races. The race war is a pre-text for the larger undiscussed class war going on between the wealthy and the rest of us. Race is a pre-text for the type of larger police control needed to subdue the masses in the event of an economic calamity that breaks down the existing social order and threatens the relative peace of the existence of the wealthy