"I have a dream....."

Yesterday as President Obama was inaugurated and the country observed the national holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, I received an e-mail message from a man I have known, respected and loved for more than 50 years. These are excerpts from that moving e-mail.

English: Dr. Martin Luther King giving his "I Have a Dream" speech during the March on Washington. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“As I do every year on MLK day I listen to his "I have a dream speech."  The words were spoken in 1963, but they still resonate today.  In 2010 I had flown back from Afghanistan on a government aircraft arriving at dawn to a cold day at Dulles airport.  As we were being loaded into the bus to go from the tarmac to the terminal, dawn was breaking and as luck would have it the radio was playing Dr. King's speech.  Having just returned from one of the most unequal and miserable places on the earth, Afghanistan, I was deeply moved at hearing his words.  They remain to me a guiding vision.

“When (redacted) and I got married she asked me what I wanted as a wedding gift.  I told her a set of the recordings of MLK's speeches.  She ordered them from a record store in Arlington and got a few odd looks.  She mentioned that she was getting them as a wedding present for her husband to be.  That got a few more strange looks.  After we were married, we went in to pick them up.  I don't know what the record store folks thought her husband would look like, but it was clearly not the short haired, white guy wearing a USMC tee shirt and a Clemson ball cap.”