Letter from the editor

In honor of a King

It may be hard to believe that the words of a black prophet could transcend time and space to reach a little white girl in the heart of racist north Idaho during the 1990s. But it happened. Then that little white girl grew into a newspaper editor in the heart of conservative Montana. And the words of the prophet still move the girl inside the woman.

I grew up within minutes of the Aryan Nation church in Sandpoint, Idaho. The group's compound was just a half hour's drive from my home. I remember passing by the church, with its shaded windows and shrouded reputation, and thinking, "That is where hatred is a religion." The Aryan's ideology focuses on white supremacy and neo-Nazi themes. The group became one of the best-known enclaves of "white pride" in the country. Consequently, when you are from their general area, people sometimes assume the worst. When I moved to California after college and told people where I was originally from, they would look me over and ask, "So are you a racist?" At first this troubled me tremendously. After a while, the weariness wore off and my response became," No, I am a humanist."

I first heard Dr. Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech when I was in high school. His words resonated in the caverns of my soul. The beauty of his vision was astonishing and profound, even to me—a fourth generation Irish-American. I had never come across hardship or strife because of my race. But Dr. King made me empathize for the first time that which I had been spared. I felt sad, because I did not fully understand the meaning behind his words.

In college I marched in my first MLK Day parade. We walked through the streets of Missoula singing "We shall overcome." What the hell did we know? We were honoring a legend, but still lacked true connection to "The Dream." But it was in college that I learned about this country's brutal history. I learned about the civil rights movement, and was ashamed that African Americans had just received the right to vote in the 1960s. But the movement wasn't about the right to vote, or the right to ride on a bus, or the right to sit at a lunch counter. It was about freedom.

We are all God's children. Dr. Martin Luther King not only understood that, he preached it. And as God's children, we all have an inherent right to exist. In these United States of America, we are also guaranteed the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. These rights are not exclusive to Caucasians—they are universal. Freedom, to be truly free, is to live without spiritual shackles. Those chains can be imposed by others or oneself. They are usually accompanied by labels: negro, cracker, fat, liberal, conservative, homo, diva, jerk, tightwad, and the list goes on and on. Dr. King told us all to shed our skins and become human beings first.

"When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, 'Free at last! Free at last! Thank God, Almighty, we are free at last!'"