History is being remembered today. Perhaps only because it’s one of those nice round-numbered anniversaries. Perhaps also because the issue of race is alive in the Democratic presidential contest. Americans as a whole have no memory for our past, so whatever the reason it’s good that the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is being remembered.
I was a child when it happened and can’t remember how I reacted when I heard the news. I didn’t appreciate the gravity of the event until years later. As it was, every night back then Walter Cronkite was telling us about riots and protests in American cities, battles in places called Hue and Da Nang, body counts and those missing in action, etc. Dr. King’s death was just more bad news received while sitting at the dinner table.
But as I got older I began to learn more and appreciate what Dr. King stood for. He was right where he needed to be when America needed him. Where would we be if he hadn’t been there?
I saw video of his last speech on tv last night and found a clip on YouTube:
The last part is so sad:
Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!
This isn’t part of National Poetry Month, but it reads like poetry:
It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. Today, October 2, a Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped, and summer was gone. …
… It breaks my heart because it was meant to, because it was meant to foster in me again the illusion that there was something abiding, some pattern and some impulse that could come together to make a reality that would resist the corrosion; and because, after it had fostered again that most hungered-for illusion, the game was meant to stop, and betray precisely what it promised.
Of course, there are those who learn after the first few times. They grow out of sports. And there are others who were born with the wisdom to know that nothing lasts. These are the truly tough among us, the ones who can live without illusion, or without even the hope of illusion. I am not that grown-up or up-to-date. I am a simpler creature, tied to more primitive patterns and cycles. I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun.
Bart Giamatti would have been 70 today. I sometimes wonder — especially when the issue of steroids, human growth hormone, and performance-enhancing drugs comes up in the news — what baseball would be like if he had lived. Not a team owner, a businessman, a lawyer, or some management guy brought in to run the league. He was an über-fan who got the reins of the MLB, but was only able to hold on for a short while.
