I paid attention to the celebration of Dr. King’s Dream Speech down on the Mall yesterday. There was a light drizzle and gray skies that apparently held down attendance.
In the original, there were a quarter million people in the audience. For the anniversary, the only number I heard was 20,000. I can’t confirm it, since the National Park Service stopped issuing estimates of crowd size after the furor over the 1995 “Million-Man March” organized by Minister Louis Farrakan of the Nation of Islam.
The Park Service said there were less than an half million people on hand for the speeches, while Minister Farrakan was claiming a million and a half. There was a bitter legal battle and the Park Service decided to get out of the business of counting heads.
The closest I could get was a report from the Washington Post that said “But the light crowd disappointed the vendors, who cut their prices for rain ponchos. The crowd, a fraction of the quarter-million who massed 50 years ago, only gradually filled in around the reflecting pool.”
I assume the rain and the tight security that goes along with it had a chilling effect on attendance. I know I would have gone, even just to observe, even a couple decades ago. But now, the idea of getting patted down and scoped just to participate in a public event is just depressing.
The other thing the suppressed numbers was the lack of presence by anyone except Democrats. That is what you get when the organizer is the ever-entertaining Rev. Al Sharpton. Well, there was one Republican there- at least in proxy. Mr. Lincoln.
It is sort of weird how much has changed in a half century. After all, that poster child for the Freedom Riders, Bull Connor, was elected as a Democrat. Please, don’t get all hissy on me- I know the parties are curiously inverted from where they were fifty years ago, but the whole thing makes my head spin.
We started that decade long ago with some real Hope for Change. And then it went so profoundly off the rails. Jesus. Do you remember when it was completely normal to hear someone famous was executed?
Marylyn, JFK, JFK’s girlfriend, Martin, Bobby, George Freaking Wallace, and a near thing with a shot at Jerry Ford. It was insane.
Then we burned down most of the central cities in America, starting with Detroit and following with all the others after Dr. King’s assassination.
I still shudder when I think about it.
Yesterday, the President gave a great speech, not that I agreed with much in it, but the rhetoric was pretty good recycled progressive cant, and blessedly bereft of any new policy initiatives. Expanding the dream to all the various hyphenated-Americans is going to dilute the sense of injustice that was so compelling about Dr. King’s dream.
If we are all victims here, who the hell are we going to march against?
Plus, it was great to hear President Clinton again. I had forgotten how entertaining he was. For all his manifest weakness and failings, Mr. Clinton is a hell of a politician. Maybe my favorite moment in his address was when he thundered out this fantasy:
“A great democracy does not make it harder to vote than to buy an assault weapon,” thundered Mr. Clinton. “We must open those stubborn gates.”
Well, I would be happy if voting included a requirement for a photo ID, just like everything else in this great land, like buying a bottle of beer, or getting on an airplane or writing a check. The process mandated by Federal Law to purchase even a .22 caliber plinker includes a background check, which if applied to the Voting Rights Act would be considered an act of racist fascism.
In Mr. Clinton’s defense, there is a wrinkle in which no ID is required to buy a gun- the individual-to -individual sale. That is the famous “gun show loophole,” which actually has nothing to do with gun shows. Even at those events, Federal Firearms License holders must check a photo ID and do a background check at the gatherings.
Individuals may sell guns to other individuals anywhere, though someone had to produce photo ID somewhere along the way even with these. So I might agree with Mr. Clinton on a narrow point, but of course, applied to voting, the photo ID would indeed disenfranchise the dead, the dead-beat, the bogus, and the illegal.
The only people who did not have to produce photo IDs to buy guns were the Mexican Drug Cartels, but they got to deal direct with the Attorney General of the United States.
I don’t think they vote, but who would know?
Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303