Martin Luther King: "I Had A Nightmare Last Night"

 

In honor of Martin Luther King’s birthday, I have taken the liberty of composing the speech I believe he would deliver were he alive today:

MLK: “I am saddened to report to you today on what will go down as one of the greatest assaults on freedom-- and reason-- in the history of our nation.

“Seven score and 18 years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon of hope to millions who were enslaved. But, more than 150 years later, many Americans are still not free. Or perhaps I should say they have once again had their freedoms stripped from them.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I had a nightmare last night.

“In it I saw that, more than 150 years after Lincoln validated Mr. Jefferson’s Declaration, too many Americans are still living lives of quiet desperation…shunned, mocked and alone. Too many Americans of all colors have been banished to the corners of society, exiles in their own land. So we have come here today to dramatize this shameful condition.

“I had a nightmare last night.

“I saw how elites of both parties, in conjunction with unelected bureaucrats, have made certain that they have unfettered access to the great American dream while deliberately making that dream almost impossible to achieve and attain for the little people in ‘fly-over country.’

“I had a nightmare last night.

“These elites have told the rest of us that they are the arbiters of whether or not our jobs are important, whether or not we may leave our homes, whether or not we may board a plane, or whether we are ‘allowed’ to attend a funeral or a church service. They have stripped us of our selfhood and robbed of us of our dignity by imposing mask and vaccine mandates. They have even tried to-- once again-- usurp control over our very bodies, telling us that we must allow an experimental ‘gene therapy’ into our bloodstreams, though the future repercussions of this cannot possibly yet be known. Similarly, they have used our children-- Black children, white children, children of every color—as guinea pigs, telling them that they can be any gender with which they identify, if we just apply puberty blockers and call them by their preferred pronouns. The Framers would be aghast.

“I had a nightmare last night.

“For so long as bigoted, self-serving, racist ideologues are allowed to wantonly denigrate America, divide its citizens, and pit faction against faction, she will never live up to its founding tenets. For so long as BLM and Antifa are allowed to roam her streets with impunity, intimidating, defacing, destroying, and desecrating, we shall never be truly free. For so long as Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project are being taught in our schools, true equality—and amity-- will be impossible. For so long as ‘intersectionalism’ is the guiding principle of ‘progressivism,’ there will be no chance for all races to come together to heal this nation. For so long as we are instructed to look at others and see only race, color, or creed— not character—we will be confined to the dark and desolate valley of bigotry, unable to proudly trod the sunlit path of racial justice.

“I had a nightmare last night.

“We must—all of us—push back and make certain that this nightmare doesn’t come to pass.

“Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy.

“ Now it the time to lift our nation from the quicksand of intersectionalism to the solid rock of brotherhood.

“Let us forever banish the growing nightmare…in favor of a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident. that all men are created equal.’

“Yes, I had a nightmare last night. But I have a dream today. A dream that all of us will one day agree that all lives matter, not just the lives of those who the elites currently favor because they believe it is in their own self-interest to do so.

“When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every tenement and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old spiritual, ‘Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.’

“Yes, I had a nightmare last night.

“But I have a dream today. I beg you all to help me turn that dream into reality.”