Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. All Men Are Created Equal. Words that Are Meant!

On this day, January 21, 2013, I saw an America in which I believe with a whole heart, an America living up to the words penned by our Founding Fathers--that we have been endowed with "unalienable" rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" and that all are created "equal." While we may not be all that we have the potential to be yet, we are much closer than I ever thought we'd be in my lifetime,  Having come of age in the Mad Men/Jim Crow eras, seeing an African-American take the presidential oath  of office for his second term is nothing short of astonishing.


America continues to change and to become.  The Founding Fathers were all white males.  They were highly educated property owners, including some who owned slaves.  But they wrote that we are all equal, that we all have the same rights.  Even if they did not mean everything that they said at the time, the people of this country have held the Founding Fathers' feet to the proverbial fire.  Those who already had those rights took them for granted.  Those who had yet to gain them--the poor, the people of color, all women--treasured those words and expected them to be true for them as well.  After all, those words had been written and enshrined.  The words were therefore meant.


On this day, the juxtaposition of the inauguration and the day that yearly honors Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the words of the Founding Fathers almost jump from the page.  In August of 1963, I sat in front of a television set in the Alpha Delta Pi basement at the University of Kentucky.  I and those watching with me were sure that King's eloquent words would sway everyone to see that all should be afforded equal rights.  And the view of all those on the mall--white and black, old and young, rich and poor, Jews and Christians and Muslims--standing together singing "We Shall Overcome"......I felt then that maybe we had.  Sadly, the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, AL less  than two weeks after that, a horror which killed four little girls, blasted us dreamers back to reality.  But today, America saw a Black man who had been elected by over 50% of the American people for the second time.  That is the dream Dr. King saw, not the nightmare we still sometimes see when people--even some politicians--use demeaning dehumanizing language to diminish those who are seen,  in any way, as different.


Nonetheless, the words--yes, the words of the Founding Fathers and the words of Dr. King are becoming increasingly real.  Many of the Founding Fathers died of old age and natural causes, but their words survived.  Dr. King's life ended abruptly with an angry bullet, but the haters can't kill and idea or a dream with guns and ammo.

Once wordsmiths like Jefferson and Madison penned the young country's aspirations on paper all those years ago, they lived and continue to live.  Today, President Obama noted that what helps one helps us all, and I was reminded of something else Dr.King said. "We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.  Whatever effects one directly effects all indirectly."


Today we saw the widow of slain Civil Rights worker, Medgar Evers, give the invocation.  We saw the Tuskegee Airman honored in the parade.  We saw the America that Langston Hughes wrote about in "Let America Be America Again."  "Let America be America again, the land that never has been yet and yet must be."


Today, we moved even closer to the country that we can be, that we must be, to thy country that we were promised,