Fifty Years Onwards

I've thought over the past weeks and days how I best want to write about and mark today's 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s March on Washington. As the day has approached and as I think about the anniversary now, I've struggled to find the words. It's a celebration and a marking of success, perhaps, but one that continues to evolve. It's beautiful and terrible and an anniversary of a day, a year and a decade that created the world we live in today. I listened to President Obama's speech earlier, and his politics and presidency aside, I was touched by his word choices, descriptions and remembrance of fifty years ago today.

The following excerpts from his speech were especially meaningful:

"We rightly and best remember Dr. King's soaring oratory that day, how he gave mighty voice to the quiet hopes of millions, how he offered a salvation path for oppressed and oppressors alike. His words belong to the ages, possessing a power and prophecy unmatched in our time."

"When millions of Americans of every race and every region, every faith and every station can join together in a spirit of brotherhood, then those mountains will be made low, and those rough places will be made plain, and those crooked places, they straighten out towards grace, and we will vindicate the faith of those who sacrificed so much and live up to the true meaning of our creed as one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

I wish I could write about some personal comparison or experience I've had in the fifty years since 1963. But I can't. Then, I heard these lines spoken by the President:

"There's a reason why so many who marched that day and in the days to come were young, for the young are unconstrained by habits of fear, unconstrained by the conventions of what is. They dared to dream different and to imagine something better. And I am convinced that same imagination, the same hunger of purpose serves in this generation."

While flying to California last week, I brought along Time Magazine's August 26/September 2 double issue. The majority of the publication explores the March on Washington and King's speech. Each of the lengthy articles was fascinating, but the following paragraph resonated the most with me:

'The most obvious observation about life since August 1963 is also the most accurate: we have traveled far, but not far enough. Revisiting King's speech, the religiously infused culture from which it sprang and the political moment in which he delivered it suggests that he, for one, wouldn't be surprised by the ambivalent state of affairs in the America of 2013. Like our more familiar founders (Washington, Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson), he was a practical idealist, a man who could articulate an ideal but knew that human progress, while sometimes intoxicatingly rapid, tends to be a provisional enterprise. The march, he said that day in Washington, was not an end; it was a beginning. We live in a world King helped create. We do not yet live in the world he helped all of us dream of." --Jon Meachem, TIME

Lastly, this BBC video combines wonderful images and audio of August 28, 1963 with present-day global peace activists. 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23853578