Well, dear readers, here we are in cold, chilly east coast North America on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the U.S.’s national holiday to honor one of the very greatest of its citizens.  The day has put Janakay in a reflective, if not weepy mood.  What would Dr. King make of today’s America?  Would he see progress from the days of Jim Crow and legalized apartheid, or a steady diminishment of the civil and voting rights laws he and others fought so hard to enact?  Does a national decision to honor his greatness by a day of service outweigh its dismemberment of the fragile protections for its poorest citizens and its increasing celebration of material excess?  Can Dr. King’s teachings of tolerance and justice survive in the face of  increasingly ugly and divisive racial rhetoric?

I continually struggle in what I regard as very dark days indeed to answer my own questions; my answers vary depending on my level of hope.  Janakay’s mood was darkened by the fact that, on a day honoring a national hero who celebrated non-violence (and who died by an assassin’s bullet), a few miles away a huge “gun rights” rally is being conducted under the aegis of a group associated with a resurgent white supremacist movement.  I click away on the internet, searching for comfort, and happen upon clips from a speech given by Barack Obama honoring the 50th anniversary of the Bloody Sunday march at Selma, Alabama.  If only for this MLK Day, because in my own little way I want to honor a man who continued the struggle while knowing he’d never reach the Promised Land, I decided to reject despair and agree with Obama that the American experiment is not yet finished and that we still hold the power to remake our nation to align more closely with our highest ideals.