Jason Luckett & Friends | 8-11pm | 117 E. Harvard St.
Hope you’ll join the friends and welcome my mother to California for her annual visit. Family shows are sometimes the best. She harmonizes silently with a smile, but makes the music richer. Please RSVP and share on Facebook.
THE PICTURE:
My family was in Atlanta, GA for the holidays and on Sunday before Christmas we went to church around the corner from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s childhood home. We were a little early so my sister and I walked over to take a look. I’d been there the year before with my girlfriend and was moved to tears confronting the humanity and hope in the mischievous boy who’d become one of the greatest leaders in history. This time, too, I welled up imagining that little hand turning the doorknob, the running on the porch and how those adult hands reached out to so many good people, those adult feet marched through streets nonviolently asserting that all should be treated as equals. So much accomplished and such hope left behind even after his violent death.
As we remember the children taken at Newtown, as we watch a biracial son of a Kenyan African and a Kansan of English descent take the oath of office at the top of the mall where Dr. King said America had defaulted on it’s promissory note guaranteeing all men the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, it’s easy to see how relevant King’s life and work is to us as a united people. It’s the beginning of the year and I’m feeling hopeful so I’ll leave you with an image that will hopefully transcend politics. It’s the image of a little boy running up the stairs to a door, turning the knob to reach the TV in time to watch the president take his oath, his parents beaming with the knowledge that it wasn’t a fluke, that a skinny kid with a funny name who didn’t fit the image of the national leaders from his youth could reach the pinnacle of success in this country. Slowly, but surely, despite ugly counter-imagery, more hope is being deposited in that bank. As the bank becomes abundant in that hope, it will rest at the edge of that moral arc of the universe and bend it towards the justice of which King spoke, a justice where life and liberty are cherished and the pursuit of happiness, not power, returns to the center of the American Dream.
