Today, a federal holiday, is the 89th birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. James Earl Ray made sure he would never have to blow out all those candles by murdering him almost half a century ago.
The deaths of American icons you've read about in history class in school, JFK, Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy, I was alive for all three and lack the words to tell you what we were like as a nation before their passing but I assure you we are better people because they lived.
I was a high school sophomore, a pimply too-loud white preppie kid, wandering around Washington D. C. on a school trip my father organized through the middle of Resurrection City, just weeks after Dr. King's assassination.
I was stunned at the scale and scope of the settlement, the audacity and eloquence of the vision that propelled and compelled it into existence and the pervasiveness of the poverty and despair that made it inevitable and necessary. Reinventing American society so that the reasons why it had to be would become history and aren't part of our present or future, is a part of the legacy of Dr. King.
Today across the country there are ceremonies and commemorations. Ours in Norwich at City Hall starts at a quarter past one this afternoon with some speeching, a little preaching (I'm guessing having attended this event for over a decade) as well as singing followed by a march to Evans Memorial African Methodist Episcopal Church for warming words on what is usually a very brisk New England winter's day and then we'll all go home, back to the lives we lead and the people we are.
I would hope this year, unlike any other before it, across this country, we can seize a moment from whatever we do today to celebrate the dream of Dr. King, make it our own and keep it on our hearts. And then, beginning tomorrow for all the days that remain to each of us, use it as a fulcrum, as he did, to change the world. Again.
-bill kenny
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