"I have a dream" revisited

[El Fuego]

This excellent columnn by Leonard Pitts, Jr. blew me away when I read it this morning:

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"... that speech he gave, that tough-minded recitation of American wrongs, that preacherly prophecy of American redemption, has become a Hallmark card, elevator Muzak, bland cliché.

I have a dream, the schoolchildren say. I have a dream, the newscast says. I have a dream, the people say. I have a dream. A dream. A dream.

They wax eloquent about the dreamer and the dream and, listening, you find yourself wondering if they realize that it was much more than a dream. That it was not, in other words, some airy-fairy castle in the sky to be reached by dint of hoping and wishing, but a noble place to which the nation might lift itself if people were willing to sacrifice and work. Nor did King counsel endless patience in expectation of that goal.

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None of which is to demean ''I Have A Dream.'' ...You see, King spoke to an audience that had been working for civil rights -- not just dreaming. They were an audience of marchers and sit-in organizers, of boycotters and committers of civil disobedience. ''I am not unmindful,'' he said, ''that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells.'' Because these were people who had laid their bodies, their freedom, their time, their treasure, their very lives on the line for a cause they believed in.

I think of them when I am asked by young people, as I often am, ''What can I do?'' about the war in Iraq or the encroachment of civil rights, or the genocide in Darfur, or the continuing intransigence of racism. They hate these things, they say, but feel helpless to respond. ``What can I do?''

It always amazes me that people who command technology their forebears could not have imagined can feel so powerless after those forebears, armed with little more than telephones and mimeograph machines, went out and changed the world. ``What can I do?''

I tell them to start by realizing that they can do. When did we become so narcotized, so benumbed and bereft, as to forget that?"

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http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/living/columnists/leonard_pitts/16462115.htm