A Good Cry on MLK Day is Particulalry Bitter.

[styersc]

Feeling nostalgic I decided to take down my box of memorabilia and find the newspaper. The State Newspaper printed on January 18, 2000- the day after MLK day in Columbia, South Carolina. On that MLK day we- black and white lovers of peace, equality and progressivism marched on the capital to tell our elected offficials that we demanded that the Racist Confederate Battle Flag be taken down from the State House Dome. The photo in the paper that following day was a giant photo, taken from the sky of a crowd of 50,000, black, white, yellow, red, man, woman, gay, straight all loved peace and each other.

I took my 7 year old daughter to her first demonstration. We arrived early at Veteran's Park where the crowd was already massive. When we began to move it took a very long time as the crowd filled the closed streets for blocks but we moved and talked and chanted and cheered and sang. My daughter and I marched in the midst of the Benedict College Gospel Choir who led the crowd around us in song. I cired like a child as I heard my beautiful, blonde haired, blue eyed little girl sing "We SHall Overcome". And when we reached the capital we could hardly see the grounds as the crowd was so large. Large, loud and in love with each other on that day.

Today- I made the mistake of suggesting that I thought that Hillary Clinton might make a better president in 2008 because of her lifetime of activism, exeperience in the electoral process and her proximity to some of the policies that I supported during Bill Clinton's administration. Now I'm told that I'm the same as a hate filled bigot. I oppose change and that I have been part of the problem all along.

I cried when I heard my daughter sing. Seems I do a lot of crying on MLK day.

[Warpy]

1. The only thing that makes me sad on MLK day

is that he didn't live to see so much progress made.

He lived to see the worst of the Jim Crow laws thrown out. He lived to see black folks able to stay in nice hotels, eat in nice restaurants, and not be relegated by law to a small part of a lot of cities. What he didn't live to see was black folks and white folks working side by side in professions of all types and seeing it as a normal thing. He didn't live to see commercials on TV selling everything from beer to bonds showing black folks and white folks as equal customers. He didn't live to see black folks being a normal part of the larger society, not an aberration, a "first" or a "second," or any sort of ground breaking thing.

One silent promise this white suburban cracker made to him during the march in a southern city honoring his passing was that I'd never live in any area that was too good for folks of any color. It's a promise I have kept. I have always lived in mixed areas and I always will. I won't say it's been easy and free of intercultural friction. It's just the way things are.

I still see subtle racism happening, like black folks getting waited on after white folks who came later are served first and it drives me bonkers that this stuff still happens. However, the sadness is not that we still have progress to make. It's that he didn't live to see the progress we have made.

[styersc]

2. The thing that makes me sad on MLK Day is that now I am

now considered in the same league as a man whose skin is my color but you wouldn't know it because he wears a sheet.

How bad do you have to want the Whitehouse that you cause so much pain to those who have stood with you for so long? IS this the "New Politics"?