Don’t You Dare Conflate MLK and Obama

[Summer Hathaway]

36. There is nothing "cool"

about attributing thoughts, words, or deeds to someone who has been dead for forty-five years, and pretending they have any basis in fact - as Mr. Ford did in his article.

I will repeat my initial reaction - as you don't seem to 'get it': No one can possibly know what a long-deceased person would have thought about anything in present times, as the years we live inform us and shape us, often in ways that change our opinions and political positions.

Using myself as an example - because I don't deign to speak with the voice of the dead - many of my views have changed over the last forty-five years. Had I died four decades ago, I would have been remembered as pro-death penalty, strongly anti-military on all levels, extremely pro-Israel without reservation, desirous of living in a commune or kibbutz, and eschewing a career in order to raise as many kids as I could produce.

Forty-five years later, however, I am against the death penalty, have a much better appreciation of why the military is necessary, have little respect for Israel and its actions, hate 'country life' and live in a densely populated city, and have a career that I find much more satisfying than being a stay-at-home mom with a houseful of kids and limited the size of my family to pursue that career.

So had Mr. Ford or anyone else written about how I would have viewed things in 2013, based on how I viewed things before I passed forty-five years ago, they would have been wrong on many, many counts. Very wrong.

Mr. Ford's diatribe assumes that MLK would have lived in a vacuum for all of the years since his passing, and would never have been informed and/or changed by forty-five years of the life he never got to live.

As I said earlier, no one could possibly know whether Dr. King, had he lived all of the years he never got to live, would have been Obama's staunchest supporter or his worst enemy. And to pretend to KNOW the unknowable is as arrogant as it is downright laughable.