« European Union | Main | Failure of Obama Foreign Policy »

The Dream Lives On

Today marks the fiftieth anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King's famous "I have a Dream" speech. The speech and the mass rally in Washington DC of which it was a part are some of the most iconic speeches in the US history, and the history of the World in general. Its fame well surpassed the borders of America, and it inspired many people around the world to aspire for a freer, more just, society. It was one of the pinnacles of the civil rights movement, which in turn lead to sweeping legal and social changes in the US. However, in many ways it was more of an aspiration speech that still begs to be fully realized.

One phrase in that speech in particular stood out for me, and probably for almost everyone else who has heard it. It's the phrase that expresses the hope that one day we'll live in the world where we'll judge each other by the content of our character, and not by the color of one's skin. This phrase in particular, and the promise that it embodied, is one of the main reasons that I was attracted to America in the first place. When I arrived to this country in the early 1990s I had just escaped the most brutal war in Europe since the end of World War II. It was a war where the minute ethnic differences were played up by the cynics, resulting in brutal deaths and expulsion of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. In America I was hoping, among other things, to move past such consideration and build a future for myself where the content of my character will override all other concerns.

And, by and large, that is indeed what I found here. Despite being a foreigner with a funny accent I was able to integrate myself in the American mainstream. In college towns across America I befriended people from all over the world. I fell in love and married a woman from a different race, who was born and raised on yet another continent. Neither she nor I have ever come across any instances of direct racial or nationalistic discrimination.

Unfortunately, over the years I've also come to know that the basic underlying premise of Dr. King's speech has only become more and more elusive in the American social and political life at large. The civil rights movement has morphed into a grotesque and shrill racial entitlement political machine. The de-facto racial quotas exist in college admissions and many other professional fields and organizations. The ugly reality of racial (and other) patronage politics has only gotten worse in recent years, and the 2012 presidential election was an unabashed flaunting of that mindset. Considerations of race reign supreme, while "character" has become a quaint word that only the unhip people stuck in the past like to bring up.

Another way in which we have moved far from the spirit of the "I Have a Dream" speech concerns its context. Dr. Martin Luther King was Protestant minister, and his views, rhetoric and message were deeply, profoundly, steeped and grounded on the message of the Gospel. The speech invokes God on multiple occasions, and can only be fully understood if one is versed in the language of the Zion. And this is why it resonated with the American public so much. A nation that professed to be following the example and the teachings of Jesus Christ could not in good faith continue to act and sanction laws that were profoundly un-Christian. This speech could not have been delivered in an atheistic totalitarian regime, and it would have been mostly ignored in the cynical post-Christian cultures in many parts of the West today. Which is why it's so tragic that there are very strong and increasingly powerful and shrill voices in the US today that are trying to strip all mentions of religion in the public square today. Many of those voices will in fact be giving the keynote addresses at the commemoration of the speech. The irony, were it not so tragic, would be laughable.

Finally, perhaps one of the most pernicious ways in which Dr. King's dream has unraveled over the years, is that we have now become a society where we are not supposed to "judge" anyone. The content of one's character, if it's even given any consideration, is given the same innate sacrosanct standing as the color of one's skin, if not actually more so. All characters are, in principle at least, equally valid and we are not supposed to favor one over another. All sorts of inherently immoral and degrading behaviors are excused and even glorified under the guise of being "nonjudgmental." This is a perversion of Dr. King's dream if there ever was one.

Despite all the ways that the aspirations of the "I Have a Dream" failed to materialize, I am still hopeful that its message will eventually prevail. But for that to happen we need to stop fetishizing that speech, stop emphasizing its superficial features, and focus more on its content and its context. Only then we can have live up to the ideals that Dr. King lived for.

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.tunguz.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/194

Post a comment

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)