My Patriotic Sermon for this July Fourth

   I went to Furman University on a Brooks scholarship for church related vocations. Well Everybody knows I never became a Preacher but I hear the voices ever so often. I have no pulpit and what follows is more of an outline, not a finished product, but I think a few preachers will read it and may use a nugget or two next year.

     I was telling a Furman classmate last night about an emotional read in 87 in Collinsville, Alabama as I was reading Taylor Branch first installment of his thousand page trilogy of the Civil Rights movement. This English major who told me John Crabtree would lower your grade by a half for every grammatical error you made in the several assigned essays in his famous Shakespeare course, even disputable commas. But he asked me what I thought of King's famous quote the Moral  Arc of of the Universe is Long, but it Bends toward Justice .

   I told him I thought it was true, especially in the historical context of the mid sixties, which might turn out to have been  the apex of the American Experiment. We have fallen a long way with the Soul Molesting Donald Trump and his lackeys.

    King made the comment in Montgomery in 65 which Marshall Frady and others say mighta been the apotheosis of his Pilgrimage. Just Two years after his I have a Dream Speech, which was within six weeks of Kennedy in Berlin just twenty years after the WW II . The Promise of those two  monumental adjustments , America defeating Communism as it rang true among the hundreds of Thousands in Berlin in 63. Kennedy himself said for a Moment he thought the platform might be crushed by the throngs in the exhuberance and ecstasy of the Moment. And then King on the Washington Mall speaking a hundred years after the Civil War, speaking truth to Power about Slavery and Jim Crow. America hasnt been there since.

   I remember about ten years ago when July 4 fell on a Sunday. I was in the Upstate and went to hear Jeff Rogers at FBC Greenville. First time I heard the story of King beginning to flail around that Grand Day on the Mall and he could hear Mahalia Jackson from Just behind him : "Martin tell them about the Dream, The Dream Martin let the people hear about the Dream".

    Now we have shallow half assed Trustees like Nikki Haley at Clemson abetting the manufactured weaponization of Critical Race theory and William Timmons of Christ Church Episcopal buying in. And the gun runner Jeff Duncan a founding member of the 2nd Amendment caucus and Dabo Swinney's Congressman.

    Ask those folks  who know nothing about Azar Nafisi and Jill Lepore. I asked Bob Jones Grad and likely next School supe of SC Ellen Weaver about it Saturday afternoon at Stax Omega. She didnt know anything. Never heard of the historial Lepore nor read her sterling piece in New Yorker on Parents and History in the Public Schools. Her sister was nice and polite but as ignorant as Ellen.

    And then there is a Miss  Gaffney  Becky or Regina   Wolfe or something  of the GHS class of 61 a year before Joe Wren. She wants to pontificate, refuses to read, but go out of her way to remind me in whatever platform possible she will vote against anybody I vote for no matter Her friend Sidney Norton would vote with me. And sadly like Ellen Weaver, folks like her are the majority of local school boards across the state of South Carolina and in the Southeast.

     Good place to stop for now. If you really love America you will want to make life learning to understand its promise, like Abe and Frank Johnson, Harper Lee and her sister Alice, My Mother and her father, a Lincoln Republican, Barack Obama who unlike Beauty Queen Wolfe has a reading list, On and On.

    So God Bless the America of Obama and Rahul Mehra, Esther Dawkins, Maria Moreno and Luis Segura, Jeff Graves and James Clyburn, J Paul Beam and anybody who has enough sense not to have bought into  MAGA of the last four years and its witless after effect.