Today is the
fiftieth anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s I Have A Dream speech.
Unfortunately the spirit of the speech has been usurped. His driving words
When we let 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!
have been usurped by the single-minded manipulators of all
stripes. The core of Dr. Kings message was that when a single person is
deprived of liberty we all are deprived of liberty. If I can quote from The Declaration of Independence
We hold these truths to be
self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and
the pursuit of Happiness
Unfortunately it took thousands of lives and over one hundred
years to grow into these words.
I am of course talking about Race. This is probably the most poorly
defined and most mis-understood word in our spoken language.
Courtesy of President Lyndon Johnson I had
the opportunity to spend a year in Biloxi Mississippi. While stationed there I found out that, as a
Jew, I was not “quite” white. My racial characteristics were that I was good
with money and smarter than most. Oh yes – I do have a small nose for a Jew.
After this education in stupidity I delved into the definition of the word Race. When literature delves into the
definition and history of the word, there is no clear standard. All I could
find out was that race is a subdivision of Homo Sapiens Sapiens, which is in
fact a subdivision of Homo Sapiens[1].
Not to be dismayed I dug deeper and came
upon our old friend – The Horse. A Horse is a member of the family Equus, as
are donkeys and zebras. So if we draw a poorly defined parallel, we have three
races of Equus, horses, donkeys and zebras. Now we run into a problem – horses
and donkeys do not breed true. The offspring of a horse and donkey is a mule.
Mules are almost always infertile.
Now lets talk about us Homo Sapiens Sapiens.
Assuming the worst possible, that white people and black people are in reality
separate races, or in this example, species. The offspring of a white person
and a black person is almost always fertile. Our President is a valid example
of that.
Again – in my humble opinion, there is only
one race of humans – and that is humans. My dream is to live to see that
finally accepted as true. Racial identity is harmful to all. We are all people!
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