Posted by
Port Charlotte Independent on Tuesday, October 21, 2008 5:00:00 PM
"If Martin Luther King were to reappear by my side today and give us a report card on the last twenty-five years, what would he say? You did a good job, he would say, voting and electing people who formerly were not electable because of the color of their skin....You did a good job, he would say, letting people who have the ability to do so live wherever they want to live, go wherever they want to go in this great country....He would say you did a good job creating a black middle class...in opening opportunity.
But, he would say, I did not live and die to see the American family destroyed. I did not live and die to see thirteen-year-old-boys get automatic weapons and gun down nine-year-olds just for the kick of it. I did not live and die to see young people destroy their own lives with drugs and then build fortunes destroying the lives of others. This is not what I came here to do. I fought for freedom, he would say, but not for the freedom of people to kill each other with reckless abandon, not for the freedom of children to have children and the fathers of the children walk away from them and abandon them as if they don't amount to anything. I fought for people to have the right to work but not to have whole communities and people abandoned. This is not what I lived and died for.
I did not fight for the right of black people to murder other black people with reckless abandon....
There are changes we can make from the outside in; that's the job of the President and the Congress and the governors and the mayors and the social service agencies. And then there's some changes we're going to have to make from the inside out, or the others won't matter....Sometimes there are no answers from the outside in; sometimes all the answers have to come from the values and stirrings and the voices that speak to us from within....
Where there are no families, where there is no order, where there is no hope...who will be there to give structure, discipline, and love to these children? You must do that. And we must help you.
So in this pulpit, on this day, let me ask all of you in your heart to say: We will honor the life and the work of Martin Luther King....Somehow, by God's grace, we will turn this around. We will give these children a future. We will take away their guns and give them books. We will take away their despair and give them hope. We will rebuild the families and the neighborhoods and the communities. We won't make all the work that has gone on here benefit just a few. We will do it together, by the grace of God.
From MY LIFE by Bill Clinton, (Alfred A. Knopf, NY, 2004, pp. 559-560)