How to make a connection to Martin Luther King Day? April 4, 1968: I remember my mom driving me home from Thursday church girls' choir rehearsal, up Nott Street in Schenectady. I was twelve years old, probably still humming something from choir. The radio was on, and the news report took my breath away. I wasn't old enough to fully understand the civil rights movement, and my life and my school classes arguably never really caught up. But the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, King, and two months later, of Robert Kennedy were vile, heart-shattering bookends for a sixties childhood. I didn't understand then why such hatred and violence existed toward anyone, anywhere, and I still do not. With the passage of decades, if anything, the perplexity and horror magnifies. The tsunami the other day wasn't just a personal one; I felt a world full of pain. It broke over me, a wave of emotions I have spent a lifetime trying to fend off. Kind of a cosmic, keening,"Why?"
Those statues, and standing stones like Stonehenge, are what I am holding on to today, such good symbols for the battered human spirit. Still standing, still standing.
