40 years, 80,000 jobs, 81%

As anyone waking today must know by now, today is the 40th anniversary of the murder of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Not for the first time I've heard excerpts from Rev. King's last speech, wherein he transcended the troubling issues inherent to the sanitation workers' strike and, some say, gave us all a glimpse of God's vision for the world even as he received presentiment of his own death the following day. And I've heard again the words of Presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy in Indianapolis, upon whom lay the duty of informing a hopeful crowd that the great leader had been taken from them. He spoke from his heart, spoke with poetry that any who have cared and suffered would understand, and left both grief and peace in his wake. Of course Kennedy would soon follow him, taken by a man with a gun. As a random newscaster here in town pointed out yesterday, 40 years is a very Biblical number. What happens next, regardless of that span of years, must be watched carefully by lovers of peace. It's a year of election in the United States.

80,000 jobs were dissolved in this country last month. 81% of Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction. (See today's Times.) This is the country we have allowed. How could a generation of Americans not have felt deep hopelessness, apathy and self-pity --- how could those who so badly needed someone powerful to speak for them not feel lost --- when so many good men were taken from them in a few short years between '63 and '68? People who preach peace and radical change are always in danger, but not so much lately -- because the oppressive establishment of corporate interests and political expediency, the old "military industrial complex" in its guise of bootstrap ideology and consumer morality -- has shoveled a hundred feet of filthy soil atop the heads of those bowed by grief and crushed by economic theory.

40 years is long enough. It's time for the pendulum to swing the other way, with a force that removes those bloated by greed and power from their seats for good.