Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Monday,
Jan. 21, cannot be just one more day of counting days. It must be a call to remember King’s goal is to create a beloved community. Hear his
words:
“Love is creative and redemptive. Love builds up and
unites; hate tears down and destroys.” No walls.
“Our
loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation.”
We need NATO and the United Nations. The world needs interdependence. “I have
decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.” “Injustice
anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
A few short weeks after
the March on Washington August 28, 1963, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have
a Dream Speech, at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham,
Alabama, Sept. 15, in an act of white supremacist terrorism bombing, four African
American Sunday School girls were killed.
Still
our Rep. Steve King cannot understand why terms like “white nationalist” and
“white supremacist” are offensive. Two years ago he tweeted “We can’t restore
our [white] civilization with somebody else’s babies.” He has long proposed a
border wall with electric barbed wire on top, saying “We do it with livestock
all the time.”
Children
still die: at the U.S. southern border and from bombings in the Middle East. But
to be a U.S. [white] nationalist means it is too expensive for us to care. We
must pull out and pull inward lest we become “overrun” with “them.”
Martin Luther King Jr.: “Our
lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” “Justice too long
delayed is justice denied.” “Life’s
most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’”
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