Martin Luther King Day

Today is the day when Americans recognize the life of Martin Luther King.  The man had a profound impact on this nation, and those impacts will echo throughout the future of America.  

As a white guy, who was less than 2 years old when MLK was assassinated, from a small northern almost all white Ohio town, it took me a while to even begin to appreciate what MLK and like-minded people did for this nation.  I doubt if I can ever fully appreciate it, but as I look out into the world and see ethnic and religious conflict I could see what America could have become.

A few years ago, the death of MLK touched me in a surprising way.  While MLK was doing his civil rights work, America was at war.  And when MLK died, my father was in Vietnam.   Back then, there was no internet, cell phones, blogs, or any of those things.  Along with letters, soldiers and their families would communicate using reel-to-reel magnetic tape.  If you seen the movie Apocalypse Now, one of the men on the boat was playing a tape like that on the river.  Sadly, these were often taped over or burned for security reasons.  However, my parents saved a few.    I spend some time converting these tapes into a digital form to preserve them before they fell apart.  Most of the conversations that we have left are only interesting to my family.  But to my surprise, my father very briefly mentioned the death of "Doctor King".  He didn't say much about it, but it was there.  In terms of MLK history, I'm sure this story is nothing much.  I'm sure everyone had thoughts on MLK's death.  However, it's impact on me was fairly strong because it was my father, my father's voice, and recorded during a war in a far away place.