The nation has always been sick; there has always been trouble in the land. The great gift is to, when fighting the troubles of this time, to be able to look clearly at the past, and turn to the task at hand saying, 'This, too, shall pass.'

And say that realizing that the future will have its own tasks to turn to - but working so that the future's tasks won't be the tasks of this time.

There never was an age when all was pure - the cold record of history, if it could laugh, would break itself up laughing at that. All that we can do is clean the areas we can, and behave as decently as possible to one another. Decency.

Mikey NTH scores. There are injuries inflicted on all societies. At any given moment, some societal aspects are in "decay" (often unnoticed); others are undergoing "repair" (often overnoticed). But in a dynamic society (as in a dynamic life like MLK's), there are trajectories to these things.

It's not Rev. King's fault that too many of his disciples perverted the civil rights trajectory he saw at the mountaintop from an overdue "We Shall Overcome" anthem into a suicidally stupid gangsta rap riff that's gone on and on and on. There are preheated cells in hell for the likes of AlJesse SharpJackson.

We need all freedom-loving brothers and sisters together if (as I think) we are on the cusp of another great awakening in America. Such awakenings don't coincide with flush and easy times. They come just north of despair.

A hard time is coming for those who insist on grouping men according to skin color and tax bracket.

Today in Atlanta, only the local FOX channel carried the full 3 hour ceremony from Ebenezer Baptist Church.

The keynote speaker, a Princeton professor of religion and Af-Am studied named Cornel West let the audience know he was in "Chocolate A-town", not Atlanta. He invoked Jeremiah Wright the Righteous Prophet and Sarah Palin the Violent Demagogue to rouse the 96% black crowd, who cheered as he white-washed Wright and blackened the character of Palin.

The usual pasty-white Democrats and one red-neck Republican Senator, all standing for election this year, grabbed front row seats on the podium and slipped on each others drool to get to the microphone to pander for votes.

Prof. West got so racist and full of hate for whitey in his rant that he had to stop his presentation at one point and go hug one of those pudgy old white men he forgot were seated behind him, ever so sincere in his insistence that what he had just said was not as bigotted and prejudiced as the words and tone made it sound.

The crowd was repeatedly told that they have entered The Era of Obama, then sat in shock as they were exposed to West's stock pantomine, illustrated with exaggerated body movements, of Those Others who knew right from wrong, but were full of emotional feces, Morally Constipated, straining to pinch-off a loaf of bad stuff, and in need of the colonic cleansing of MLK's love.

I doubt that MLK,Jr ever thought of himself as the moral equivalent of Ex-Lax.

The summation of West's rage was that reparations have only begun to be paid, Barack Obama better start paying somebody besides Wall Street/Bankers/Big Pharma/Usual Oppressors, Obama must stop the wars, quit putting brothers into the prisons-for-profit system, plus some other demands.

The event affirmed that the racial shakedown business is alive and so profitable that another generation of black children are being groomed to choose it as a career path. The Post-racial Era of Obama is very racist, and it's Bush's fault.

We'll be on the right track when Black racists receive the same well deserved censure as White Racists. Until then- screw them and the donkey they rode in on.

JWM

Now that's a great comment, two lane. A great one.