ON MARTIN LUTHER KING DAY

Let us remember and adhere to Martin Luther King’s vision otherwise celebrating today is to be as cynical as most of today's politicians

 The words below were written by David Von Drehle for today’s Washington Post. Their order has been altered.

 "Today, Monday, the nation commemorates 90 years since King’s birth. This year’s holiday finds many of us in our own dark places. Love for enemies is in short supply. Solidarity with the poor, the stranger, the prisoner, is widely mocked. Tribes, sects and identity groups command loyalty, while the principle of universal and essential humanity goes begging"--

 "We honor Martin Luther King Jr. not for his victories, which remain incomplete at best. We honor him for his vision, and for his sacrificial commitment to that vision. He saw what we might be capable of — as individuals and as a nation — and believed in that possibility so deeply that he dropped everything else, even life itself, to hold it high where we can always see it. At such a time, it is good to remember that the life we revere and celebrate this week was shadowed by doubt, stalked by division, haunted by fear and plagued by a sense of failure."-=

 "Like King, we also choose each day whether to live in hope or fear, with love or hate, as builders or destroyers. From King, we learn the lesson that these choices are never as easy as they sound and never as popular as we imagine. In King, we have a model for choosing, and a fierce example of the final refusal to give up"--

  "At the time of his murder in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. had become the proverbial prophet without honor in his own land. A survey by the Harris Poll found that the 39-year-old civil rights leader appeared to have lost his grip on the American imagination. Three out of 4 white respondents said they disapproved of King’s work after his turn against the war in Vietnam. More striking, roughly half of all black Americans also disapproved.

 Only a few years earlier, King had been at a zenith: In 1964, he was Time magazine’s Man of the Year and the youngest person to date to win the Nobel Peace Prize. His success in seeing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 signed into law was followed by the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

  But 1968: This scant time later, King was widely criticized, even by his peers in the civil rights movement. African American leaders admonished him not to bring his protests to their cities. Of black leaders such as Roy Wilkins of the NAACP and Rep. Adam Clayton Powell (D-N.Y.) of Harlem,  King lamented:  “Their point is . . . Martin Luther King is dead; he’s finished; his nonviolence is nothing. No one is listening to it.”