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In Our View: Progress made in judging people on qualities
Sometimes it seems as if the world is in some kind of crazy spiral and things will never get any better. People can be rude, politics seems to get us nowhere, prices keep rising. Life just looks bleak. When those days come, sometimes a little historical context works wonders.
It was 40 years ago this week that Martin Luther King Jr. was shot on the balcony of a motel in Memphis, Tenn. Most people remember where they were when extraordinary events happen. This writer was on spring break from the University of Illinois, interviewing at newspapers on the East Coast for that all-important first job.
One of the cities I was visiting was Wilmington, Del. The rioting that followed the assassination resulted in the National Guard's deployment to the city for nine months, the longest peacetime occupation of American soil.
It seemed that this assassination negated what little progress had been made in the country in the previous eight years. Little did we know at the time that just two months later, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, a presidential candidate, would be gunned down in the lobby of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
To a 21-year-old college senior, the world seemed a pretty harsh place where progress was made slowly, if at all. It made one question what difference an individual could make in a place so filled with hate.
That is why what is happening now is so remarkable. Forty years ago, the idea that there would be a viable presidential candidate of another race was unthinkable. It was equally unthinkable that a woman could make a serious run at the nomination. Regardless of your politics, that is a pretty substantial change.
As an idealistic young journalist, I yearned for the day where people would be judged on their qualifications, not their race or gender. The world is not perfect, of course. Some of the ugliness of the old days still seeps in when some people talk. But to have a major party fielding two candidates - an African-American and a woman - is a change worth mentioning.
The tragedy is that humankind has to work through the ugliness to come out the other side. Let's hope that we have truly done that in this country. Let's hope that we are finally mature enough as a nation that we can evaluate people for who they are and what they believe instead of how they look.
It was 40 years ago this week that Martin Luther King Jr. was shot on the balcony of a motel in Memphis, Tenn. Most people remember where they were when extraordinary events happen. This writer was on spring break from the University of Illinois, interviewing at newspapers on the East Coast for that all-important first job.
One of the cities I was visiting was Wilmington, Del. The rioting that followed the assassination resulted in the National Guard's deployment to the city for nine months, the longest peacetime occupation of American soil.
It seemed that this assassination negated what little progress had been made in the country in the previous eight years. Little did we know at the time that just two months later, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, a presidential candidate, would be gunned down in the lobby of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
To a 21-year-old college senior, the world seemed a pretty harsh place where progress was made slowly, if at all. It made one question what difference an individual could make in a place so filled with hate.
That is why what is happening now is so remarkable. Forty years ago, the idea that there would be a viable presidential candidate of another race was unthinkable. It was equally unthinkable that a woman could make a serious run at the nomination. Regardless of your politics, that is a pretty substantial change.
As an idealistic young journalist, I yearned for the day where people would be judged on their qualifications, not their race or gender. The world is not perfect, of course. Some of the ugliness of the old days still seeps in when some people talk. But to have a major party fielding two candidates - an African-American and a woman - is a change worth mentioning.
The tragedy is that humankind has to work through the ugliness to come out the other side. Let's hope that we have truly done that in this country. Let's hope that we are finally mature enough as a nation that we can evaluate people for who they are and what they believe instead of how they look.
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