I took the day off, went to town to buy some dog food, borrowed a router, came home & did a little woodworking in the basement, after, of course, herding the three horses back into their paddock. The fourth horse, Gabriel, has to good sense to stay inside, where there is easy water. I actually finished the work that I borrowed the router for, & it looks good. My router, by the way, is in the shop, so I must thank The SideKick for lending me one of his tools. Digby has a good piece on conservatives & how they have dealt with Martin Luther King, Jr., over the years. Note what that old, dead man of conservatism, Ronald Reagan, Alzheimer's President, had to say:
Another, even more prominent conservative said it was just the sort of "great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order, and people started choosing which laws they'd break."
That was Ronald Reagan, the governor of California, arguing that King had it coming. King was the man who taught people they could choose which laws they'd break--in his soaring exegesis on St. Thomas Aquinas from that Birmingham jail in 1963: "Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. ... Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong."
In the same post, Digby quotes Rick Perlstein & it's a good piece of thinking.
I have come to realize that conservatism's single most identifiable characteristic is its fear (of progress, the other --- everything.) And nothing scared conservatives more than the great progressive Martin Luther King, who faced them down peacefully with grim determination and awesome courage. Why, if African Americans could overcome, then what was to stop anybody from believing that "liberty and justice for all" applied to them too. Thanks, Reverend King for making it so.
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