Submitted by Terence Blackett
Yesterday was the 47th anniversary of the historically memorable – I Have A Dream prophetic speech on the Hill* of the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. Words which still move the heart, minds and consciences of men everywhere – words, worthy of their rightful place in sacred cannon. But let us not be fooled – like all prophetic utterances, time is still the crucial determinant factor.
In Dr. King’s own words – “We must be careful at this point not to engage in a superficial optimism or to conclude that the death of a particular evil means that all evil lies dead upon the shore. All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem. The Kingdom of God as a universal reality is not yet. But just as we must avoid a superficial optimism, we must also avoid a crippling pessimism. Even though all progress is precarious, within limits real social progress may be made. Although man’s moral pilgrimage may never reach a destination point on this earth, his never-ceasing strivings may bring him closer to the city of righteousness…”
On this anniversary of Dr. King’s speech, political demigod, FOX News commentator and Tea Party activist Glen Beck and an army of predominantly Caucasian supporters gathered at the said Lincoln Memorial and sought to upstage the legacy of King’s prophetic historical window in time by “billing itself as “restoring honour” to the US and rekindling what Beck and other speakers saw as the spirit of the American Revolution – family values, low taxation and cutting the Federal deficit.” Beck’s speech was peppered with references to God* and the fact that it was time for American to forge a new direction – “We have had moments of brilliance and moments of darkness. But this country has spent far too long worried about scars and thinking about the scars and concentrating on the scars.”
But what if the “scars” are still visibly offensive? Can we sell the truth – in order that we may purchase and accommodate a lie?
Is this the same guy who called America’s 1st Black President a racist and someone who hates white people? Where is this “reverse speak” coming from? As Goebbels said – “Tell a lie often enough, people will believe it.”
Elitist Caucasian Americans have realized that Martin’s Dream is gaining greater traction while on the other hand, many Blacks due to economic uncertainty in these difficult times are developing and “adopting a fatalistic philosophy stipulating that whatever happens must happen and that all events are determined by necessity.”
Dr. King opined in “Shattered Dreams” that “fatalism implies that everything is foreordained and inescapable. People who subscribe to this philosophy succumb to an absolute resignation to that which they consider to be fate and think of themselves as being little more than helpless orphans cast into the terrifying immensity of space. Because they believe that man has no freedom, they seek neither to deliberate nor to make decisions, but rather they wait passively* for external forces to decide for them. They never actively seek to change their circumstances, for they believe that all circumstances, as in Greek tragedies, are controlled by irresistible and foreordained forces. Some fatalists are very religious people who think God as the determiner and controller of destiny…”
Dr. King also suggests that this view is expressed in a verse of one of our Christian hymns:
Though dark my path and sad my lot,
Let me be still and murmur not,
But breathe the prayer divinely taught,
Thy will be done.
King believes that fatalism purports an appalling conception of God for everything whether good or evil is considered to represent the will of God (even racism). He believes a “healthy religion rises above the idea that God wills evil. Although God permits evil in order to preserve the freedom of men, He does not cause evil. That which is willed is intended, and the thought that God intend for a child to be born blind or for a man to suffer the ravages of insanity is sheer heresy that pictures God as a devil rather than a loving Father…”
The power within the “SERMON ON THE HILL” destroys the mythology and the paralysing determinism which King concludes that most of us think we are:
But helpless Pieces of the Game He plays
Upon this Chequer-board of Nights & Days
And that we need not trouble about the future, for
The Moving Finger writes: and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a word of it.
Click on the link as a reminder today of how far we have come and how much further we need to go…
Be blessed!!!
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