Today is the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. It devastates me every time I hear the speech from the night before he died.
In it, he says “I want to commend the preachers,” a statement I’d like to draw out in relation to Jeremiah Wright. For more on that, and other thoughts on the relevance of King’s vision today, see Isaiah J. Poole’s “Forty Years Later, Still Far from the Mountaintop.”
So this morning finds me crying at the kitchen table to hear King’s words and contemplate anew that we are the society who killed him (God damn America), confused about which of my several jobs to address first, feeling sorry for myself because I’ll miss my son Amos singing his heart out onstage tonight in “All Along the Watchtower”
“There are many among us /
who think that life is but a joke.”
What I want to hold in the mud of my messy morning (laundry, taxes, the Libyan novel, the overdue library books, the bags to be packed, the evening panel to imagine, the afternoon at school to listen to the 2nd grade biographies) is the vision King still gives us of a man who knew what he was about. That the human spectrum holds such clarity. It must be something to end the day thinking, It really doesn’t matter with me now.
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