Where Has the Dream Gone?

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had a dream. All too often, we don't talk about the entire dream. And all too often, we don't want to talk about our failures over the last four decades to get anywhere close to that dream.





So where are we? And what has happened to King's dream? When did the dream become this nightmare?









Not that long ago, it was easy to just laugh off "tea party" extremism as silly... But look at what's happened. And for far too long, questions of inequality have been placed aside. And as we wonder when our occupation of Iraq will end, when our occupation of Afghanistan will come to a close, and when another military invasion and occupation might ensue, we must wonder if we've become far too much of a culture of violence.

When did we forget this...



And embrace this?





What happened? What happened to Dr. King's dream? Where have we gone wrong in the last 43 years? Why are so many of our people still treated as "second class citizens"? Why do we never have the resources to help our people help themselves, but we somehow always have more money to wage more wars? Why have we become so violent toward each other?

These are the questions I have today. As six people have been buried in Tucson, our country is still mired in two wars abroad, Congress is set to debate (again) why we should or shouldn't have access to affordable health care, and federal courts consider whether queer folk actually have Constitutional rights, we need to ask ourselves what happened to Dr. King's dream... And how we can finally turn the dream deferred into the dream fulfilled.