Dr. King’s message from 1963 is what America needs in 2022

As a nation, we celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr Day the third Monday of January – this year on January 17.

On August 28,1963, Dr. King delivered one of the greatest speeches in American history.  It’s popularly known as the “I Have a Dream Speech.” 

It is a speech that must be dusted off and studied anew today, because it contains the very message that our nation sorely needs right now. We need to hear it, we need to digest it.  We need to make it a part of us. A message that has been tragically buried, it is, and replaced with great and destructive distortions.

Upon reading this speech, how can anyone not see that Dr. King’s great message that day stands in total contrast to the rhetoric peddled by progressives over and over and over today?

The indictment of the woke movement is that America is the problem. But Dr. King offered up America as the solution. He talked about the “magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.”  And yes, they’re in quotes in his speech.

The problem, as King explained, was not America, nor the eternal truths that were brought to bear in America’s founding. The problem he saw was the failure of the nation to live up to the challenges of its great founding principles. 

Dr. King appealed to the nation to realize the dream of its founding fathers. Not to crush it, not to bury it, not to trash it, not to transform it. We keep hearing that from the left, but it’s inconsistent. And, in great contrast to the most memorable and often quoted line in his speech. What we’re hearing today is exact opposite of what we heard in his speech.

He said in quotes, “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,” end quote.

What has happened instead is that in the name of racial justice, race campaigns of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion – they call it – DEI – DEIs are being embedded into every one of our federal institutions today, which categorize every American to define selection and placement based on race, based on color of skin, based on what the left deems – whatever they want that day – whatever’s politically expedient that day – is now written into this DEI.

If you look deeply into King’s speech, you might notice that it is divided into three parts. Part one is an appeal to the nation to live up to its great founding principles. Part two is an appeal to black Americans – at that time they were called Negro – Negro Americans to rise-up and act accordingly in the noble cause of the pursuit of liberty and justice.  Let’s not “drink from the cup of bitterness.”  

Part three is an appeal to the ideals of the Christian soul of the nation. He quoted the prophet Isaiah that “the crooked places be made straight… and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed: and all flesh shall see it together.”

Quotes – that’s right from the bible, that’s right from the speech.

Biblical truths and ideals have been sadly lost to wokeism, which has for all practical purposes become a religion in itself. A religion that tries to demonize and cancel all who disagree. Harsh religion.

So for those of us who want to acknowledge the biblical truths and ideals that guided our founders to bring us on a journey to build a more perfect union, let’s honor Dr. King. Let’s honor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr this King holiday week by revisiting and taking to heart the great truths he spoke on that summer day here in Washington, D.C. in 1963.  Great truths that have been sadly cast aside and replaced with the religion of politics and power. 

That’s the culture war, and we can honor King by seeing America as he presented it then, as embodying the ideals of a free nation under God. That’s 2022 mission coming into and out of King Holiday.