Social commentary

There’s a saying that hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, and good times create weak men. Martin Luther King lived through hard times, It made him a strong man.

1968 was a very turbulent year. Lyndon Johnson did not run for re-election after public opinion turned against him over endless Vietnam. Though that decision was made back in 1964

Let’s admit at once that there is ample evidence of growing opposition to any Johnson election to a second full term in 1968. Little would be gained here by reciting it. That year was a dramatic one, to be sure, with assassinations, a convention with street demonstrations, and a highly visible—and audible—left wing of the Democratic Party yelling ever louder in the hope of crushing the incumbent part of the party as soon as possible, forcing it to give up, in advance of evolving events.

“I have a dream that my 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.” MLK

On December 7th, 2023 a person tried to burn down Martin Luther King’s birthplace.

Officers arrested the 26-year-old woman around 5:45 p.m. Thursday after responding to a report of vandalism in process at the two-story home in the historic Auburn Avenue Historic District, according to a police statement. Police say a preliminary investigation shows the woman had poured gasoline on the property before people at the site stopped her.

“We believe at this time she was pouring gasoline on the porch and the door of the home. Their quick action saved a jewel of our city, something very important to Atlanta,” Atlanta Police Chief Darin Schierbaum told WXIA-TV.

Video shot by a witness and broadcast by local television stations shows a young woman dressed in black pants, a black shirt, and a black knit cap holding a large red gas canister standing on the front porch of the house and dousing the home with a liquid. A police report says she was not wearing any shoes.

The woman has since been identified as a decorated Navy veteran and obviously, some mental health issues could be at play here. Recalling Dr. King’s invocation of judging someone by one’s character, there was no mention of her race in the PBS report. Commendable. Would this apply to anyone who wasn’t Black?

And mental illness notwithstanding, what would prompt a Black person to want to destroy his birthplace? 

And this is the Rub. I was a living witness to Dr. King’s career, his advocacy of non-violence in fighting racism,  for civil rights, and equal opportunity was inspirational. His death by assassination after seemingly predicting it the night before cemented his place as a giant in 

There was no question in my mind of what Martin Luther King meant to convey, an America that would finally live up to its ideals of the Constitution and finish the work begun after the Civil War. 

 Yet today, 60 years after King shared this vision during his most famous speech, there is considerable disagreement over what it means.  

As we mark the King’s holiday, what might he ask of us at a time when both the president and a disproportionate number of people in poverty are black? Would King have wanted us to completely ignore race in a “color-blind” society? To consider race as one of many factors about a person? And how do we discern character? For at least two of King’s children, the future envisioned by the father has yet to arrive.“I don’t think we can ignore race,” says Martin Luther King III.

“What my father is asking is to create the climate where every American can realize his or her dreams,” he says. “Now what does that mean when you have 50 million people living in poverty?

This is why MLK III!  What!  LBJ’s Great Society only made things worse for African Americans.

 When conservatives (like me) embrace MLK and what he so eloquently preached, well, for the Left, it’s time for re-evaluation.

For many conservatives, the modern meaning of King’s quote is clear: Special consideration for one racial or ethnic group is a violation of the dream.

The quote is like the Declaration of Independence, says Roger Clegg, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a conservative think tank that studies race and ethnicity. In years past, he says, America may have needed to grow into the words, but today they must be obeyed to the letter.

“The Declaration of Independence says all men are created equal,” Clegg says. “Nobody thinks it doesn’t mean what it says because Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. King gave a brilliant and moving quotation, and I think it says we should not be treating people differently based on skin color.”

Many others agree. King’s quote has become a staple of the conservative belief that “judged by the color of their skin” includes things such as unique appeals to certain voter groups, reserving government contracts for Hispanic-owned businesses, seeking more non-white corporate executives, or admitting black students to college with lower test scores.

On May 25th, 2020 a Minneapolis police officer had a very bad day.  This was the spark that lit  A powder keg that had been set by then-President Obama.

And for the rest of that summer blue American cities were wracked with riots, looting, and arson. Democrat mayors of these cities told their police depts to stand down. And thus they allied themselves with the radical Marxist groups Black Lives Matter, and Antifa.

Criminals were given free rein to loot and pillage at will. 

Then de-funding the police became the order of the day in blue cities across the country. So was it any surprise that things like this happen?

In 1984 the the Irish band U2 released “Pride” (In the Name of Love) about MLK and his assassination. For Black Lives Matter and Antifa “Love” is not on their to-do list.

BLM lives on the grift of “white guilt”. Antifa is funded by Leftist billionaires.

The words of Martin Luther King are irrelevant to these bastards.

I will close with this:

January 15th was the official federal holiday commemorating Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday which unlike many, for once falls on his actual birthday. For sure, he had his faults and his flaws like any other human being, but his core beliefs and what he fought for, and the ways of nonviolence that he advocated to achieve them stand in stark, absolute contrast with what the Anti-American Left and its co-conspirators in the Democrat Party have done to this nation in the 60 years since Dr. King’s heyday (and really since Burr murdered Hamilton).

Instead of equality of opportunity, and content of character over color of skin, we have been “fundamentally transformed” into a dystopian society where things are just the opposite. I just have to write the name “Claudine Gay” and you can well imagine Dr. King somewhere in the great beyond weeping, if not hurling epithets. It’s bad enough that we have a hierarchy based on the most irrelevant things such as racial, ethnic, and sexual characteristics, but the purveyors of this poison have as central tenets the notion of oppressed and oppressors, where the latter are defined with the immutable characteristics of being genetically pre-disposed to being such. That is, an evil that must be eradicated, “by any means necessary.”

I’m glad I’m old. the future does not look promising.