forty years later

most sensible people still "have the dream":

Today is the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, and media commentators have throughout the day been making references to King's I Have Dream speech and talking about keeping King's dream alive.

I'd like to, but I'm afraid that King's dream is pretty much moribund. The dream was, in part, that someday his children would be "judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin." The dream was that we would live in a color-blind society where people would look past one's race and pigment to one's values and achievement. Unfortunately, modern liberalism has made that all but impossible.

So far from making race an irrelevancy, liberalism has made it a matter of crucial importance. Affirmative action, race-based scholarships, minority set-asides, race-norming, school busing, welfare, etc. were all attempts to compensate blacks - a kind of reparations - for the abominations of the past, but whatever they accomplished for black people in general, they surely stoked white resentments and pushed further into the distance the day when skin color doesn't matter.

...(read the rest)...

Like Martin Luther King a lot of us have a dream, too. We dream of the day when what matters in a man is what values he holds. What kind of morals he lives by, his ambitions, his attitudes toward his family, his community, and his country. We dream of a day when the things that we share in common are more important than the things which make us different. We dream of a day when the color of one's skin matters no more than the color of one's eyes, and when everyone, regardless of ethnicity, recognizes that the best way to guarantee a united, cohesive future is to share grandchildren in common. Even so, if that day is ever going to come, liberalism is just going to have to get out of the way.