Back From Pine Cove, But...

...there's really only one thing that should be blogged about today:



See, I keep my list of heroes pretty short. Unlike the baseball Hall of Fame, where they seem to believe that you should vote a few players in every year, I believe that the McKinney Diner Hall of Fame should be reserved for true heroes in every sense of the word.

A charter member of the Diner HoF is the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. And, I'm really appreciative of the U.S. of A. for having a holiday in his honor.

So, to sharpen us all, I found a provocative quote from Taylor Branch (Pulitzer Prize winning author of MLK history):

Despite America's reluctance to embrace the King holiday, Mr. Branch thinks the civil rights leader "would be amazed by a lot of the positive transformations" in today's America.

"He would be stunned by the incredible growth of the black middle class, especially in his hometown of Atlanta," Mr. Branch says. "And he'd be happy to see that there were black players on the University of Georgia football and basketball teams. And overall, he'd be thrilled that there's a prosperous interracial life in America, that there's no terror at integrated events."

Still, "he'd be dismayed by all of the problems that we pretend aren't there," Mr. Branch says, "the amount of poverty, the schools, the Middle East, the lack of real optimism in our public discourse about what's possible. You don't hear about the possibilities of democracy. We just throw spitballs about who's liberal and conservative."

Gentle reminder: Let freedom ring, everybody. Let freedom ring.