Martin Luther King’s Nightmare
"Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.
"But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we've come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.”
But he was not without hope for the future. He concluded by saying, "I have a dream! 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.”
It was one of the most stirring speeches of all time, a speech that touched the hearts of all but the most hardened segregationists. However, rereading that speech from the perspective of forty-five years later, one cannot help but wonder how King, were he alive today, would react to the election of Barack Hussein Obama as President of the United States.
All over America, in city after city, African Americans stood in line for hours, anxious to cast their votes for a man based on little more than the color of his skin. They would tell us, I’m sure, that they voted for him because of the "hope” he offered and the "change” he promised. But ask them what hopes he inspired and what positive change he might bring and they would be unable to answer.
Apparently unable to figure out for themselves that an Obama presidency promised only more of the "soft bigotry of lowered expectations” that American leftists have offered for generations, their long lines took on a carnival atmosphere… much as if they were awaiting the reading of a rich uncle’s last will and testament. It mattered not that Obama’s brand of social tinkering… all dressed up in black face and the stench of thuggish Chicago machine politics… was no different from any other socialist regime in history. They were about to elect a man of color as President of the United States and that’s all that mattered
Did it mean nothing to them that the statue of the great man in whose shadow Martin Luther King stood, Abraham Lincoln, was the first Republican President of the United States? Did it mean nothing to them that the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, outlawing slavery and giving blacks citizenship and the right to vote, were all conceived and promoted by Republicans?
Were they unaware that it was Republicans who enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Civil Rights Act of 1875? And were they unaware that, some twenty years after the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was passed, when Barack Obama’s party had enough members on the U.S. Supreme Court, they wrongfully declared the public accommodations law "unconstitutional?”
Had no one ever told them that it was Republican presidents who wrote the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and the Civil Rights Act of 1960, or that it was Republicans who played a crucial role in passing the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968, and the Voting Rights Acts of 1965 and 1972? Were they unaware that the Ku Klux Klan was created by Democrats to accomplish outside the law, that which they could no longer accomplish within the law?
It is not surprising to find black people who are totally unaware of black history. Most are graduates of public schools where Black History is a standard part of the curriculum, but who is it that teaches those classes? Members of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, organizations that function as auxiliaries of Barack Obama’s own party… the Democratic Party.
If black voters in the major coal producing states were unaware of what it meant when Obama declared in a January interview with the San Francisco Chronicle that the implementation of his cap and trade policies would cause some coal-burning electric utilities to go bankrupt, and that the cost of electricity would go through the ceiling, then who do we blame for that economic ignorance?
Is it possible that Democrats find it much easier to win elections when the special interests they serve are held in economic illiteracy? Is the "dumbing-down” of the American people a part of some gigantic "left wing conspiracy,” or is it only by accident that the NEA and the AFT have contributed so much to the "dumbing-down” process?
On November 4, 2008, just over forty-five years after Dr. King delivered his "I Have a Dream” speech, his dream was savagely turned upside down. Some 65 million Americans voted to elect as President of the United States an inexperienced young black man… the most liberal member of the United States Senate, a man with a long history of association with some of America’s most virulent haters and detractors, a young man who openly advocates the most destructive kind of economic and social policies… not on the "content of his character,” as Dr. King would have wanted, but solely on the "color of his skin” and his ability to read a speech from a teleprompter.
I suspect that Martin Luther King, while smiling on the outside, would have been crying on the inside. He gave his life working toward a dream, but that dream has become… a nightmare. |
