It strikes me that as we approach the Martin Luther King holiday on Monday, we are further away from his values and his dream than we have been in many years.
On the horizon are the clouds of war, both with Iraq and potentially, down the road, North Korea. Pride, stubbornness, and ideological inflexibility have led the world closer to the brink of its own destruction than at any time since the Cold War ended. As Dr. King said, "Today there is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence."
On matters of race in America, the party in power continues to harbor its dirty little secret of appeasing the racist portion of its party with its anti-civil rights agenda while paying lipservice to diversity and equality.
With regard to civil rights, the government has taken to imprisoning people of certain nationalities as part of a "registration process," many of whom are guilty of nothing more than being a victim of government bureaucracy.
And on matters of justice, the Bush administration continues to support the rich and the powerful at the expense of the poor and the meek through sweetheart deals to Big Business (Enron, Microsoft, and others), tax cuts which fatten the stock accounts of the wealthy while adding mere pocket change to the wallets of the poor, and welfare reform policies which do nothing to help the poor be empowered to lift themselves out of poverty, but instead cut them off without a dime well before they can reach that point.
Martin Luther King was the most powerful Christian prophet of the 20th century, and yet less than thirty-five years after his death, we seem to have gone completely deaf to his message. May God have mercy on us all.
1:57:24 PM 
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