Martin Luther King Day

{{The Fan presents a semi-off-topic post and hopes regular sports fans will understand}}

America is entering a historic week as Barack Obama will be sworn into office on Tuesday, fittingly, the day after Martin Luther King Day. For this Caucasian writer, it's a week to bring reflection and admiration. Though the Fan voted for Obama's opponent in the election, Obama is our president and will be prayed for and supported. The significance of the election is not lost to one of the Fan's generation.

The Fan grew up in Bergen County, New Jersey and had close friends that included a Jewish kid and an African American kid. For most of our young lives, it didn't matter as we shared a love of sports and would play hours of basketball, or whatever, on the Jewish kid's home court.

Things changed quickly as the early 1960s featured race related items on the news that our parents watched. During those years of strife, racial rioting occurred right in the next town to us, its epicenter just six miles away. It became clear to a youngster that there was a problem and it seemed bigger than we could solve in our three on three basketball games.

It's difficult to explain to today's younger generation what it was like to go through the assassinations of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. The world seemed to develop an off-kilter feel and the American optimism was tempered with fear and mistrust. Vietnam polarized us and racial upheaval seemed to throw the entire country in an uproar.

Let's face it, most of our parents in those days were racist. It was all they had known, which, in and of itself, is understandable, but not an excuse. What troubled us young people was that, for the most part, our parents were religious (The Fan's were not). How could we figure out that Jesus died for all people, but some were better than others? He still did, by the way...

It seemed that every week, we watched the news and some Klu Klux Klan rally or some abuse by that group were reported. The counter rallies and marches, led by King and other groups that were more radical, erupted into horrific battlegrounds and brutality, usually by the police. While our parents nodded in agreement with the harsh crackdowns, we young people were troubled deep inside by the images we witnessed.

It was impossible to grow up in the Fan's generation and not have some racist inclinations. The Fan was always for equality and wanted us all to get along. But, fear was always close by when walking by a black man alone on an empty street. The fear wasn't rational, but it was racist ingrained. Anyone who truly says they are enlightened is not. Only those who admit they are not have a chance of getting somewhat close to it.

The Fan lives in an area of few minorities. Interestingly enough, where there are no minorities, new ones are created. Here, the Acadians who were dispersed from Acadie (now Nova Scotia) by the British settled largely in the Saint John Valley in towns like Madawaska, Maine and trickled down to all the other towns in our area. "They" became the minority and the lesser race.

It seems human to see difference in appearances and social customs as defining pecking orders in the dance to see who comes out on top. How ultimately sad it is to spend so much energy working not to get along with a people instead of the other way around.

Add to this lifetime of observation, unexpectedly, and somewhat miraculously, we had a woman as a major candidate and an African American and an African American won the national election. Who could have predicted that ten years ago?

To people of the Fan's generation, Martin Luther King's speech at the Lincoln Memorial is the most amazing, stirring and impassioned bit of rhetoric ever uttered. The Fan urges everyone to find an archival tape and watch it. He must be smiling down at where his speech helped bring us.
And now, 41 years after King's assassination, 80 years after his birth, 62 years after Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby broke baseball's "color" barrier, 101 years after Jack Johnson became the heavyweight champion of the world, 73 years after Jesse Owens foiled Hitler's Olympics, and a day after Martin Luther King Day, America will have its first African American President.

Only time will tell if Obama turns out to be an effective leader. But at this commencement of his presidency, the Fan wonders in a sense of awe how we have been able to come to this point. While we are far from being a healed and united nation, we have made up some distance and it is a new day and a new step for us as a people.