Opinion:

Choices

I lived in Memphis on the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered. I was only 3 and 1/2 years old, so my memories are not very clear of that time. I know one of my earliest memories is of my father going out the front door to our house with a load of books under his arm, on his way to college.

I have vague memories of a time when everyone seemed uneasy or fearful, and I suspect that was the period right after the assassination of Dr. King, when no one knew if there would be riots or other reaction to the murder.

What I do remember more clearly is the endless discussion in Memphis for years about the site of the murder, turning it into a museum, and the attempts at gaining parole by the murderer. Ultimately, Memphis was changed by this event, and not necessarily for the good. The changes were shaped by the reactions of the leaders in the area, and sadly their responses were not ones that led to recognizing and combating the hatred that led to the murder. Race relations in Memphis have always been strained within my memory, and they still are even now.

We are all products of our pasts, our individual pasts, the collective past of our nation, and the even larger past of the world still rings with effects of events of thousands of years ago. We should try to recognize the good in our pasts, and learn what we can. Dr. King was not a saint, but then none of us are. He was just a man, a man with a powerful idea, a vision that captured imaginations, and he was willing to talk about that vision and truly lead in a way that was away from divisiveness, a path that would have been all too easy for him to take in an age where fire hoses and dogs were set upon peaceful marchers who had the "wrong" skin color. He chose to not respond to hatred and violence with hatred and violence, despite that choice being the easy, natural, and human one. Sometimes we achieve our true humanity when we choose to rise above our human nature and make conscious choices instead of automatic reactions.

Our choices on how to react to events and how to respond to ideas are what make us who we are, and the nature of those reactions and responses reveal in stark clarity at times what kind of people we are. Some choose well, others choose badly. Some make one choice, then have a change of heart and make a different choice. Even doing nothing is itself a choice.

How will our choices look a decade from now?

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You can find the text to Dr. King's most famous and arguably best speech at Dean's World.

Joe Gandelman at The Moderate Voice has written of his own memories of the day Dr. King was murdered.