Northern Valley Beacon

Strange day.

To prove their essential decency and love of freedom and equality, a number of South Dakota bloggers are quoting Martin Luther King's "I have a dream speech," as if they are the first to have discovered it or understood. In their self-absorption, they cannot conceive that there are people who marched with the Rev. King, who did the fighting and the work that carried out the vision he projected.

In South Dakota, it is ironic. The irony is revealed in a newspaper article datelined Memphis by Bob Mercer. Mercer recounts how South Dakota resisted Martin Luther King day, as well as Native American Day, but how they became established not out of moral conviction that they memorialized important advances in our civilization and democracy, but out of political rivalry and one-ups-manship.

The words of Martin Luther King on blogs devoted to defamations and verbal persecution of people who think and believe and live differently from their authors are the ultimate in perversion.

On this day, we can ponder how far this country has come in surmounting racism and vicious social injustice. But we can look at blogs and ponder more how much work there is left to do. And we can think of the diminishments of human worth and the betrayals of human trust perpetrated by the current regime in power and those who support it.