There are those who hijack the dream and put it on ads that oppose affirmative action. There are those who sanitize the dream and place it in a political context that ignores Dr. King's intent. There are those who fine-tune the dream to eliminate its controversy. They all are, in the vernacular, "tripping."
And we are "tripping" because we have gone along with a philosophy that makes poverty a crime, not a national problem. We treat people who are poor as if they messed up, not as if the economy generated unequal and uneven results.
Dr. King, on the other hand, so abhorred poverty that he described it as an abomination.
"The curse of poverty has no justification in our age," wrote Dr. King. "The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct, and immediate abolition of poverty."
Instead of abolishing poverty, Americans have decided to both demonize and Abandon the poor. We are singing, "We shall overcome someday," ignorant of the fact that some day never comes unless you schedule it. We are swaying -- Black and White, together -- while forgetting that Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans also have a stake in the dream. We are providing gospel music, but no gospel action as a backdrop to the dream.
It is much more comfortable to talk about a race-neutral dream than to tackle economic reality. Perhaps this is why so many people who believe in freedom sing and sway but have stopped to rest along the way. We have put Dr. King"in a box," and his vision is struggling to get out.
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