(Martin Luther King - born 83 years ago)
It's always tempting to ponder what the world would have been like had things gone differently. Had Gandhi not been assassinated, had neither Kennedy been assassinated, had Martin Luther King not been assassinated.
What sort of world? Had the goals been fully realized, had the plans continued, had the voices remained clear and not faded into memory. Had they all eventually gone peacefully in their sleep at the end of perfect days. Tempting to think about.
But life is never as it seems and fate always has different plans.
This weekend we're celebrating the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, born on January 15, 1929. The world has changed immeasurably since the day he was born - due in no small part to him being in it.
No doubt there will be countless playings over the next few days of his landmark "I have a dream" speech - the film footage, scratched and faded will seem from another time. The famous phrases heard over and over will probably seem less potent now than they did that day in 1963. Pundits, the shrill, the painfully misguided and the Agenda Grinders will give their interpretations and the original intent will be distorted, if not the words themselves.
Rather than play that particular speech, I thought I would play something probably less known. In fact, something considered lost for a quite a while.
During Christmas I ran a holiday sermon delivered as part of the Canadian Broadcasting Company's Massey Lecture Series. The 5 part series devoted to lectures and sermons done by Dr. King. Today I am running Lecture #4 - "Non-Violence And Social Change".
Dr. Martin Luther King: “Life is sacred. Property is intended to serve life. And no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on. It is not man.”
The lecture talks about the recent (1967) riots and the current role of non-violence in the Civil Rights Movement. It's not a sermon and not a speech delivered to a crowd. It's a talk, given by him in a small room in a radio studio - one on one, spoken from the heart.
