Prattville Dragoons Commander's Column for August - Martin Luther King's Dream Speech

The last week of August was the fiftieth anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.  I’m sure you heard about the observances locally and in Washington DC as the main stream media was consumed by the story.   It was said that King’s speech paralleled (or plagiarized) Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.  I was listening to my favorite local black radio personality the other day and this anniversary observance was a primary topic.  His studio guest came in to discuss race relations and he agreed with Kevin Elkins that the current atmosphere in Montgomery is very bad and he blamed it on the black community living in the past and harping on the victim mentality.  Elkin claimed that the black community was responding to the white community continuously commemorating the Confederacy.  If only that were true I thought.  If there was a greater knowledge of our Southern history and heritage and the constitutional principles our forefathers followed in creating the Confederate States of America paralleling the founders and framers of our United States of America 100 years prior.  

Whereas H.K.Edgerton espouses that blacks should embrace their antebellum history and heritage which helped build the prosperous Southern economy and culture and instilled in their people a Christian foundation, King’s speech while seeking to be visionary, dredged up the same old victimization excuses that we continue to hear fifty years later despite inordinate progressive social programs and laws meant to prop up the black community often at the expense of the greater general societal welfare.  King’s speech dreams of a day when men are not judged by the color of their skin but, the alleged “post-racial” leadership in Washington promotes racial disharmony selectively interfering or ignoring “hate crimes” and gang violence.   The federal government continues to demand biased affirmative action and civil rights measures and socialistic redistribution dictates meant to enslave everyone, confiscating wealth from the producers and doling out to dependents.  

King claimed that the “negroes” of 1963 were still exiles, languishing, victims of injustice, “crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination”.  Fifty years later after a concerted immeasurably expensive war on poverty and despite all the “work” of the NAACP, the National Negro College Fund, the Congressional Black Caucus ad nauseam and after two Constitutional Amendments and four Civil Rights Acts and myriad other laws and executive orders, there is supposedly no progress.  It’s not enough.  Admission and hiring quotas are not enough.  Blacks are still inordinately poor and so a pure socialistic redistribution agenda is underway throughout our nation.  The prisons have an inordinate proportion of black men so we must prohibit profiling in criminal investigations and seek the underlying root cause of the apprehension and detention of these "victims of the biased system".  

While segregation in public housing, transportation, schools, and organizations were banished, the black “distrust of all white people” which King decried remains.  Voting privileges were bestowed and despite unprecedented unemployment (even worse in the black community), lackadaisical economic growth, and a deteriorating position of the United States as the preeminent superpower in the world community, 96% of blacks voted for the incumbent in the 2012 Presidential elections.  Was that because “they… judged (the candidates not) by the color of (their) skin but by the content of (their) character” or record?   Is this the result of King’s dream?  Chicago and Detroit crumble into desolate ghettos.  Black-on –black crime soars.  50% of the murders in the country are committed by a 3% population demographic.   Lincoln stated, “There is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.”  Was Lincoln right? 

All men are created equal according to our Declaration of Independence cited or plagiarized in King’s speech.  But creation is not achievement, ability, or desire.  Opportunity is available but initiative and ambition is not inherent.  Lack of success is blamed on unfairness.  On another of Elkin’s recent radio shows they were endorsing health care reform such that any and everyone should get the same medical treatment as Warren Buffett.  Is that true? Akin also rebuffed critics of Montgomery public schools, that only those with children enrolled in failing schools have the right to complain, not those fleeing these dangerous schools that have turned their backs on God and discipline, competition, testing and elementary education for our children.  Those who foot the bill thru their tax dollars for these schools who fail our children and our society have no basis to object.  

King went on, “I have a dream that one day down in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”  “A 2008 study by Jenifer L. Bratter and Rosalind B. King conducted on behalf of the Education Resources Information Center found that interracial marriages are twice as likely to divorce.  73% of black children are born out of wedlock.  Black fathers are absent.  Is this the brotherhood and sisterhood King envisioned?  Our great-grandfathers left their children but to defend their families and their homes in the War of Northern Aggression.  

Is the freedom King shouted about embodied in racially biased socialistic government bureaucracy and control and regulation and entitlements?  Free healthcare?  Free food stamps?  Free housing?  Free phones?  Are they really free?  Have we lost sight of limited government and constitutional principles, responsibility and self-reliance and the liberty for which our Confederate ancestors fought and sacrificed?   “Let freedom ring.”