Editorial: Reaching for the dream
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There once was a man who had a dream.
He stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial during the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. He looked back 100 years to a great day in American history and spoke about how far we have come, but he also turned his eyes ahead at how far we still had to go.
He spoke of how people deal with injustice because they are different from one another. He spoke of the great chasm between the poor and the rich.
And while he acknowledged where we had fallen down, he did not encourage anyone to stay down.
Instead, he shared his vision of a day that he could see down that long, long road toward the future. A day when there wasn’t injustice or discrimination or hatred or separation.
He encouraged us all with his words. He made people of all colors and faiths and backgrounds hunger for that day.
Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream, but when listening not just to the words that he spoke but the passion that fueled them, he made people believers in the hope of a world without the shackles that hold us back, chains made of racism and poverty and a dark despair that we can’t find the light.
King didn’t live to see that day. Cut down by an assassin’s bullet, he didn’t live to know the impact his dream would have on an America that struggles with its aspirations of freedom and history of injustice.
In the more than 50 years since he died, more people have reached for that dream, striving for a world where character is more important than color. More of them have died along the way.
But every day that someone recalls that dream, and every day that someone falls along that road to the future but gets back up, the dream comes a little closer to coming true.
Today it is for us to stand in front of the monuments that bear his name, on a holiday that commemorates his life and his work, and recall the journey that brought us this far. We can lament that we haven’t reached the Promised Land yet, but we can never stop trying to get there.