http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/28/opinion/28blow.html?_r=1&th&emc=th

 

August 27, 2010

I Had a Nightmare

By CHARLES M. BLOW

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was already dead when I was born, and yet I idolized him the way most children idolized athletes and pop stars. I had the poster and the T-shirt, I knew the speeches and the places he’d marched.

He was smart and brave, steadfast and unmovable. He was a man consumed by conviction and possessed by the magnificent radiance of the earnestly humble. He was an eloquent speaker and a beautiful writer. He cared more about justice and equality than fame or fortune. He was a beacon of light in a world beset by darkness.

That’s why the nightmarish idea of Glenn Beck (who has called President Obama a racist and compared Obama’s America to “The Planet of the Apes”) holding a “Restoring Honor” rally on the 47th anniversary of — and on the same site as — King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, so incensed me.

Glenn Beck is the anti-King.

(I find it curious that many of the same people who object so strenuously to the Islamic cultural center proposed for Lower Manhattan, many on the grounds that it is inappropriate and disrespectful, are virtually silent on the impropriety and disrespect inherent in Beck’s giving a speech on the anniversary of King’s address.)

But Beck seems bent on appropriating the civil rights movement. In April, he read his audience the civil rights movement’s commitment card and then said, “Looks to me like the next phase of the 9/12 Project.” (9/12 is a “nonpolitical movement” started by Beck last year to “protect the greatest nation ever created.”) And Beck has said of this rally, “This is a moment, quite honestly, that I think we reclaim the civil rights movement.” Reclaim? From whom?

Beck wants to swaddle his movement in the cloth of the civil rights movement, a cloth soaked in the blood and tears of the innocent and oppressed, a cloth his divisiveness and self-aggrandizing threatens to defile.

In fact, to even insinuate that the president’s policies are in any way equivalent to the brutality of the Jim Crow South at the time of the civil rights movement is the highest order of insult, particularly to those who lived and suffered through it, as well as to those who live with its legacy. If Beck truly thinks these movements are comparable, I have some pictures of “strange fruit” I’d like for him to see.

And yet, I’ve come to the conclusion that anger is the wrong reaction to Beck’s rally in Washington. Anger provides too low a return on investment. It consumes a tremendous amount of energy, but yields little progress. Instead, we should each take this opportunity to listen to the “I Have a Dream” speech once more, paying particular attention to how the echoes of yesterday’s struggles reverberate in our present struggles, and to recommit ourselves to the nobility of righteous pursuits.

We should use Glenn’s nightmare to reconnect with Martin’s dream.

I invite you to join me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter, or e-mail me at chblow@nytimes.com.

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"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs