Fifty years ago today, huh?
One of the very first things I remember
in my life was an April evening at my parents' house on Norway Avenue
in Marquette. I don't know why it sticks out so vividly in my
memory, but it does. I was in the kitchen, and I think my mom was
there. My dad came running up the stairs from the basement, where he
was watching TV, and shouted out a line that's stayed with me ever
since--
“Martin Luther King has been shot”.
Now, at the time, I didn't know why my
dad came running up the stairs with the news. I had no idea who
Martin Luther King was; after all, he wasn't an astronaut or a cast
member on “Star Trek”, the only non-relatives I was aware of in
the world.. But I remember feeling like he must've been someone
important for my dad to come running up the stairs like that.
In the years to follow I would come to
realize just how important he was.
If you've been reading these at all the
past however many years I've been writing them, you know of my
admiration for the man who was assassinated fifty years ago today.
I've read his works, studied his philosophies in college, gone on
pilgrimages to the important places in his journey, and tried to live
my life according to the example he set. Like Dr. King himself, I
haven't been perfect with that last one, but I do try.
I wonder how different things would've
been in the past half century if he hadn't been killed on that early
April evening. Near the end of his life he was finding it harder and
harder to convince people, both black and white, of the reasons behind the movement he was
trying to lead. Would he have been able to break through whatever
wall he was hitting, and advance the fight for civil rights and
against both income inequality and the Vietnam War, the two issues
that were taking up most of his energy? Or would he have found a
society growing resistant to the chance for which he advocating?
I don't have the answer to that. I've
often thought that had he lived, he either would've retreated to back
to the parish life that gave him his start, or he would've gone on to
even greater heights. I'm probably not in a great deal of company
here, but I've often thought that he was the greatest President the
United States never had. If he had lived, maybe he would've been
able to fight through the institutional barriers that were in his
place, and change the country in ways that we're still debating about
today. After all, one of my favorite King quotes (used by him by
actually originating with someone else) is “The moral arc of the
universe is long, but in the end it bends toward justice”. If he
had lived, maybe he would've seen the arc bend in his lifetime.
It's just sad we'll never know.
Churches across the country will be
ringing their bells just after 6 tonight, fifty years to the minute
after he was assassinated. If you hear those bells ringing, think
about how in that moment one man's life—and perhaps the destiny of
a country—was forever changed.
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