Lots going on today on this newest of national holidays. Unfortunately, MLK Day, like most of our other holidays, has been put in service to create yet another 3-day shopping weekend. Meanwhile the nation slowly forgets why this day was set aside as a national holiday in the first place.
Dr. King was gunned down in Memphis, Tennessee in 1968. Had he remained alive after that watershed year, America's racial politics might have taken an entirely different direction.
What Dr. King preached was racial equality. And frankly, at the time his assassination occurred, the majority of Americans--reluctantly or not--were coming around to his point of view. His murder allowed hard left radicals to take over his movement and actually turn it 180 degrees in the opposite direction. And in so doing, they quickly alienated the many non-blacks that Dr. King had brought, one by one, into the equality fold.
In the name of class struggle, Dr. King's unworthy successors actually succeeded in re-segregating society, creating their own Jim Crowe system of segregation where whites (particularly white men) are irremediably evil while all "persons of color" are therefore good; where blacks are only authentic blacks if they vote only for Democrats and demand annual tithes from anyone who is not "of color;" where every black failure is blamed on white mails and every black success is due to Democrats and not to the power and competence of the black achiever him or herself.
I could go on, but the point is obvious: Dr. King was for racial equality, not re-segregation. He was for equal chances, not stacked decks one way or the other. Ultimately, he favored a color-blind society. Much of America was ready to embrace this in the late 1960s. Most conservatives, myself included, have favored this for decades. But Democrats and leftists of all stripes work actively against it, as successful equality and color-blindness would eliminate a major pillar of the class hatred they need to stay in power. Embracing true equality would rob these hypocrites of the only way they can keep themselves in power today.
This was not Dr. King's dream. Let's use the rest of today to think about this and try to recalibrate before we all take ourselves over the cliff.
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