pass in time
Of late, America has allowed those days leading up to MLK Day to somehow devolve into new opportunities keep writing more ugly chapters to the Decline and Fall.
Or maybe not. Take today: maybe in the mere fact that we're even hearing about today's big story, Seymour Hersh's new piece on Donald Rumsfeld's game of G.I. Joe versus Cobra the Enemy, there is the tiny green gem of possibility, some hope that shadows exposed to the light will scatter (The Pentagon knows these articles are "read in Damascus," scolded CNN's mannish Pentagon correspondent-lady this afternoon. Don't "misinterpret," and more importantly, don't "miscalculate," she begged the mullahs and Islamists who just might be tuning in, not to mention those Republican pundits who might be quick to, well, say whatever about what they will undoubtedly - now, anyway - condemn as wild and crazy guy Hersh's wild and crazy charges. And, hey, if he is on target, who gives a fuck, anyway? Four more years, right? The people have spoken!).
Among the many profound lessons of MLK's life, perhaps one of the most beautiful lives a human being got to live in the last century, was that the road to the Promised Land is a long one, frought with danger and inequity, plagues and Pharoahs, all that bad biblical stuff. King's path, if we look at it in the prophetic tradition, was (and is) not an easy one, nor is it easy to see one's way along it.
Just maybe, then, today's revelations, regardless of their "misinterpretation," might mean some lives saved, might mean a war averted, and in time, the minor figures who cast such a long shadow today will pass on, to coin a phrase.
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