I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
And this will be the day -- this will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning:
My country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.
Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrim's pride,
From every mountainside, let freedom ring!
And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!
It really is such an important symbolical moment in the USA's history. :-)
ReplyDeleteAlthough there is still one frontier in MLK's speech to be made someone else's dream: that all men (it should be "human beings", really) are born equal ("created" sounds very much like Creation, denoting an ID assumption), and atheists are people too. ;-)
As a Canadian who might have voted for Obama (or Nader, is he still around?), I still think a lot of people are being too optimistic.
ReplyDelete"I still think a lot of people are being too optimistic"
ReplyDeleteBeats pessimism with a stick....