The first assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. was a national tragedy, but his assassin succeeded only in killing the man. The idea King lived and ultimately died for, most beautifully captured in his famous wish, his dream that his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” survived him. Ideas are not killed by bullets.
Ideas are killed by other ideas.
The second assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. is being conducted today by the people who pretend to understand and share his dream. They’re public intellectuals, race-baiting hacks, cynical hustlers and profiteers, idealistic fools, and people deceived into believing that they will always be victims without freedom or agency. They’re not killing the man but rather something the man valued more than his own life. As he said in his final speech, “Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will.”
Today, figuratively speaking, the heirs of Rosa Parks are demanding reserved black-only seating on the public buses of Montgomery.
Small, mean, vicious people, those hacks and faux intellectuals and agitators, are busily destroying the life’s work of a man larger in death than they ever will be in life. Their ideas have more in common with those of the bigot who murdered King than they have with King’s own — are in fact the antithesis of the message King brought.
Published in Culture
I think you’re giving them too much credit.
Maybe. But I think it’s more like Tolstoy’s unhappy families: there are all kinds of error, all kinds of motives and justifications for unfortunate ideas. I think we make our job harder — that is, make it harder to reach those people who can be reached — when we reduce the folks on the other side to one kind of fool or one kind of villain.
I think most people, even people who fall for the left’s prattle, are neither fools nor villains. I know many people who simply assume that the activists of BLM are the good guys, and that their grievances are legitimate. Because they’re busy living their lives, and they don’t much care about radical politics. (And they don’t understand that, as the saying goes, radical politics cares about them.)
Very well said, and something that needs to be repeated often.
It does seem that King’s dream has been assassinated so to speak. I see little to none of it spoken of in the public arena. I think most people see race through the popular lens. They saw 0bama as proof that race, color, racialism, and racist thinking was passĂ©. The voted for Hope and for Change. And what they got was a racist president, who was subtlety and pervasively hawking racist thinking and stereotypes — abetted by the unthinking Press — that focused people’s attention on race rather than humanity, equality, that we would all sit down together at the table of brotherhood, in an oasis of freedom, considering the character of others, black and white children joining hands, where the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.
This dream, King’s marvelous exhortation, doesn’t speak of racism, profiling, or racist reasoning, it is not even more than the simplest acknowledgement of race, but the acknowledgement of our common humanity and a call for unity of spirit and of good will toward all.
You are certainly right, that this has all but disappeared in the minds of racist activist and their followers who would drive a new wedge within the forming color-blindness and and the focusing on character that King put forth as an alternative to the prevailing injustice and oppression.
If everything else in America were fine, with prosperity and justice, liberty, and freedom for all, this attitude of segregation alone would be enough to cause men of good will to weep.
This is not just selling diamonique in place of diamonds to unsuspecting rubes — which is the place of hucksters. This is exclusionary, condemnatory, and its words are exhortations to unjustified violence upon those who differ from them only in skin color. It is the inversion of and the reinstitution of racist thinking at the highest levels of government. It is a call for rioting and racial violence such as we saw throughout 2020. And it never had to be — except that some, the likes of Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, and Kamala Harris who excused, promoted, and funded it.
King is gone, and I fear as you point out, his dream is now gone, and who will once again make this clear and persuasive call for tolerance, brotherhood and cultural and spiritual unity?
pResident Biden is quoted as saying the George Floyd’s death had far more influence than MLK’s death.  (Tucker said in a sense he was right because the ensuing 1968 riots were opposed by the PTB and people everywhere as opposed to the 2020 riots that were supported by woke politicians, media, corporations, and academia.) But I would submit that MLK’s life and death over time affected hundreds of millions of his fellow citizens and made them a more tolerant and color-blind society.Â