hold fast to dreams

It’s a fine line, I think, to start pointing fingers at something another person does that rattles our nerves. Inevitably, there is often a revelation in that finger pointing that says something about our deeper nature… about what lies in our heart of hearts that we get so irate when we see someone else do something we don’t like in ourselves. It’s also a fine line to project my own sentiments on a group of people. I hope to think that I understand some of my fellow humans… and even have sympathizers. I also recognize that sometimes I live so far in my head that my ideas might not work so well in reality.

Those disclaimers named, I have to contemplate something that irritates me right now. It is a finger point. And yet… I just have to wonder at this world sometimes… and why we make the choices of anger and forgiveness that we do.

So, there’s been all this hullabaloo about Park51 in Manhattan. (That would be what so many others misname the Ground Zero Mosque.) I’ve gotten swept up in it. I’ve felt my blood boil at the idiocy and blatant, unabashed prejudice this argument has given credibility to. And yet… I also respect the fact that… some of that irrational anger comes from wounds that are not yet healed. It is also a major exploitation by one political side.

Whatever. In a couple weeks, it will be forgotten. Like everything else that means so much to us in a moment.

There is another story on the periphery of my brain… something I’ve known about through the pundits I regularly watch to distract myself from life’s banality. The fact that Glenn Beck is going to Lincoln Memorial to give a (non-political my ass) speech/rally on Saturday. If you hadn’t heard this story, Saturday is the 47th anniversary of the ‘I have a dream’ speech.

I don’t suppose Glenn Beck and his followers see it this way. Maybe even his critics won’t either. And I certainly am jaded in my perspective of anyone who represents the Fox propaganda machine. But I do find them racist. The things they say are fueled with hate, illogically spewed to ignite a reaction as opposed to a provocation of well rounded thought. It doesn’t seek to build bridges (as most evidently witnessed with this whole Islamic center argument). And… I don’t know, it seems a sort of sacrilege to me that this man should descend on Lincoln Memorial in the shadow of that magnificent speech and peacemaker.

But this is a country of paradox. The very theme of that speech was freedom. So is it not a testimony to freedom that any person can stand on the steps of a Federal government building and say whatever they want? Even if it is singed with hate inducing rage… even if it ends up bastardizing one of the greatest ideas of the last century?

I can’t make the argument of sacred ground… that anyone died on the steps where he is going to make this speech. But to invoke the spirit of the civil rights movement, a movement that caused many unnecessary deaths, isn’t that… offensive in some way? Black, white, Christians, Jews, men, women, children died for MLK’s cause… in ways that were much more brutal and terrifying than anything that happened on 9-11. They died because they dared to stand up to a reality that said they had no rights… that decided the color of one’s skin determined a lesser amount of freedom. Is it right for Glenn Beck and his tribe to use this movement as a mirror to his own? To put the anger (and I’m not saying it lacks legitimacy) of struggling whites on a par with the oppression of blacks for centuries?

Maybe this is a non-issue. Maybe it is me being a hypocrite for condemning Glenn Beck for condemning my view of the world. But something about it… something about the energy and toxic ideas that will be amplified tomorrow in front of our 16th president… it makes me sad. And not because I disagree with what will be said tomorrow. Because… because so many will forget the dream deferred.