Dr. King Would Have Voted For This

August 27, 4:38 PMSpiritual Life ExaminerRabbi Ben Kamin

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Dr. Martin Luther King, August 28, 1963 

Whatever your politics, it's hard not to note that Sen. Barack Obama's acceptance of the Democratic nomination for president exactly coincides with the 45th anniversary of Rev. Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech and vision.  Whatever your politics, this has to raise one's spirits as an American.

To my stepchildren, in their teens during this historic confluence of history, race, and dreams, there is no discernible race issue. They understand and honor the jubilation people such as me feel in the meaning of Obama's milestone candidacy but, to everyone's benefit, they don't quite realize what the big deal was. In that polite default of theirs is a fulfillment of Dr. King's words at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963: “I have a dream – that one day my children will be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

My stepkids in 2008 are sending text messages and interfacing on MySpace with black kids, Asian, Muslim, Jewish, Latino – they have no rainbow, just the sky itself.   My own daughters, politically active and in their 20's, feel the trembling excitement of walking across a previously forbidden bridge.

It is not all harmony, and it never will be. What started in the Bible, that is, human prejudice and the proclivity to violence, will never end. There is still a beastly war to protest, 40 years after Vietnam. Nooses have appeared on college campuses and in city squares – a most grisly reminder of the deepest Southern tradition of racial contempt. The economic gap in America remains an indictment of America's fairness doctrine, and it cuts across racial lines.

An elderly Martin Luther King Jr. likely would have spoken and written about this postmodern version of national discrimination. He would have only been 79 this year and would have called us to distinguish between the security of our border and our plain old insecurity about brown immigrants.

He certainly would have smiled at Barack Obama; the thunder and lightning that made him wince at the Mason Temple in Memphis on the night of April 3, 1968 – when he eerily prophesied his own death that occured the next evening – would have given way to some fresh light and happy noise.

45 years after The March, Dr. King would nonetheless be most jubilant that we all have the right to vote, and that whatever our politics, we all can cast our dreams.