"The United States is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."
Martin Luther King Jr, April 4, 1967
After Martin Luther King Jr gave his "Beyond Vietnam" speech in New York's Riverside Church, Time magazine called it "demagogic slander" and the Washington Post claimed King had "diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."
Forty years later, with a black man as president, we may have learned greater tolerance towards racial differences, but we are tragically far from tolerance of differing opinions.
This parochial addiction infects every possible aspect of American life from our literature to our entertainment, our government and our media. It distorts the electoral process and is consequentially the single largest threat to American democracy. Out inclination to blame notwithstanding, there is no one scapegoat at which we can direct our damning finger- the media and our government are really only reflections of ourselves. They may be distorted, but the origin of their perversion is the same just as our partisan ridicule is largely a reaction to what we see and hear in our news and from our government.
And so on this celebration of Martin Luther King's legacy, I'm challenging myself to listen to people that I might normally shut my ears to. Listening is the only way we can begin to understand each other, and if we fail to understand each other we defer to our innate urge to fear that which we do not understand. It is this fear that is at the heart of discrimination and this fear that only tolerance and tolerance alone can overcome. Instead of judging people by the creed of their politics, let us instead judge them by the content of their character.
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