This diary goes out to those of you who haven't donated or done any volunteer work to support Obama's campaign.  It's for those of you who are disappointed in his FISA vote or other things.  It's for people who feel they're back to choosing between the lesser of two evils.

I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in the spring of 1968. We heard the news of Martin Luther King's death on Brazilian radio. Our friends began to knock on our front door, also frightened.

I was nine years old, sitting next to my mother on the couch in our living room, watching our black and white television, as she wept.  Bobby Kennedy had been shot and she had woken me up because she knew that I'd be as devastated as she was.  My father, a meat-cutter, had left for work as usual at 5:00a.  

She probably heard it first on WBZ-AM radio out of Boston.  In those days, long before 24 hour news, there was not much TV programming before 6:00a, and we only got four stations anyway and one of them was UHF . . .

So my mom woke up her nine-year old - the youngest of five and already a political hound - and together we watched a sad bit of history and wondered how the world had gotten so uck-fupped.  We tried to make sense of why and who would feel the need to kill Bobby Kennedy, he who had seemed a ray of positivity in a dark time.  Who would want to kill someone who had stood up in a dark moment just a few months earlier and extemporaneously given eloquent voice to the collective wail of grief at the murder of Martin Luther King?

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I'm incredibly proud of my Ph.D. from Boston University in part because it's something I share with MLK, and in part because my grandmothers were illiterate. In the past, I noted in comments that Markos, MLK and I have advanced degrees from the same school, but, you know, his was only a master's or something like that. (I respond to condescension in kind.)

I strongly favored John Edwards because I judged the candidates by their words. Nevertheless, I had been rejoicing those words from MLK for the past several months, and especially yesterday, because Obama became the nominee based on his words and character. Today, I recall them in a negative light.

Markos, thank you for reminding me that my teeth are "gross" as a consequence of having uneducated refugee immigrant parents who let me drink coffee every morning throughout elementary school but didn't encourage me to brush my teeth, because they just didn't know any better. I'll rush right out and get my teeth whitened for you.

I was in a large office, full of light, outside the window on the east was the morning sun, the window to the west showed the sea, to the north was a bright full moon, sparkling stars, and a great night-view city-scape in the distance, with a spring-laden orchard in view to the south.

I could hear the sound of furious activity coming in from a hallway somewhere, leather soles drumming rapidly on marble floors, phones ringing like mad.  

In front of me there were three men seated at a conference table, sipping coffee, or water, occasionally making notes.

Young men and women were coming in and out of the room often, bringing papers and dashing back out again with memos or other tasks.

There's an old-fashion paper desk calendar there, and in the surreal way that only dreams seem to have, an assistant casually tears off a blood-stained page that reads "June 1968", leaving the crisp new one that reads "June 2008.

Slowly I begin to get the identity of the three men...

This truly is a night of nights. Something we have all dreamed but didn't think it could ever be.

Let me start by admitting that this diary is highly speculative and I would appreciate any factual corrections and contradictions that address my admittedly fallible memory.

While I was well into my adulthood in the 1960s and fully aware of the spate of assassinations that threatened to draw the United States into the category of third world regimes or "developing" nations, and while I never fully bought into the explanation that the removal of national leaders was accomplished by apparently irrational individuals acting on their own, I didn't buy into the conspiracy theories either--for the simple reason that my own mother-in-law covered that particular territory for our whole family all by herself.

Besides, the single nut theory of political assassination was apparently preferred by those most intimately affected.

Hillary's offensive remarks in S. Dakota made me start to think. With the JFK Assassination, everyone you speak to who was alive at the time, has a distinct memory of where they were and what they were doing when they heard that terrible news.
I just wanted to ask where were you and what were you doing when you heard the news that RFK was shot?
Initially it was JFK who inspired a generation, but I think it was RFK who motivated that same generation to ask, "why not".

Martin Luther King's ( official)  Birthday falls  on Monday,  Jan 19, 2009, the very day before the Inauguration Day of the new President. This extraordinary timing could provide the moment for grass-roots focus on a new rebirthing for America, no matter who the new President and Congress are.  

I suggest that we begin NOW stirring people to create a Nation-wide Day of Prayer & Action for Peace & Justice on MLK Day, focusing prayer & advocacy & action on the new President and Congress and involving EVERY denomination and local congregation that we possibly can.

"You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them," Obama said. "And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
     - The Huffington Post, Mayhill Fowler - April 11, 2008

"She knows better, she knows better shame on her. Shame on her, she knows better shame on her. Ha."

Tom Brokaw's stirring two-hour History channel tribute to Martin Luther King was one of the best docs
I have seen in a long time.  Great talking heads from the original sources--Andrew Young,  John Lewis.  The best part was so much 1960s video footage from television broadcasts.  

I caught this post over at jackandjillpolitics.com and it is a perfect summation of the arrogant hypocritical posturing of Christopher "White Man's Burden" Hitchens.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       Vote for Obama.

Today is the 40th anniversary of MLKs assassination. I was a junior in college at the time. It was a surreal time: Gene McCarthy's candidacy; the surprise New Hampshire primary; RFK entering thr race; LBJ announcing that he would not seek the presidency; MLK's assassination; RFK's campaign and the electricity it generated; clean Gene's campaign and how it energized the Peace movement; RFK's murder; the Chicago convention with Mayor Daley's "gestapo tactics and the subsequent police riot; the election of Nixon; the absolute feeling of despair.

My friend Ira had his photo in the NY Times today, with his old friends.

There's more...

Four days after Dr. King's death, on April 8, 1968, I introduced a bill that would allow this nation to celebrate the life and work of its greatest civil rights leader with a federal holiday. Though it would take 15 years, from 1968 until 1983, the King Holiday Bill was eventually signed into law through the efforts of friends on the ground and friends in the Congress. Unfortunately, John McCain was not one of those friends.

Please be gentle with me as this is my first ever diary. I was watching Hardball just now and Chris Matthews made a slight issue over the fact that both Clinton and McCain were in Memphis today making speeches to commemorate the anniversary of Dr. King's assasination, while Obama was not. He's not the first I've heard today try to make something over the fact that Obama was not in Memphis but in Indiana, also a symbolic place this day given it was there that RFK announced King's death.

On the evening of April 4, 1968 I was an innocent 14 year old secretly watching TV instead of studying. Suddenly those words we’ve all come to dread popped up on the TV screen, "Special Report." In an instant the journey that became 1968 began. In less than six months I would go from that innocent 9th grader looking forward to escaping Junior High to a frightened sophomore entering High School with more knowledge of the fragileness of life than others around him.
Sure we all learned a lot that year beginning with the news that night that another great man had been assassinated. Martin Luther King, Jr. was dead. Within days my own hometown of Baltimore Maryland joined other cities that were already ablaze with the fire of riots. But that night as the news broke of one city after another erupting in violence something would happen that would change my father immensely. Up to then my father didn’t get Martin Luther King, Jr.