by Daniel Sisk

Created on: October 08, 2008

Recalling the life of Martin Luther King, I was reminded of dreams and nightmares: Native American genocide, slavery, Japanese-American interment, McCarthyism, our past support of various despots (yes, even Sadam). The failures of a nation.

Sure it's easy to look back through the enlightened spectacles of present day; still, we all like to think we would've done things differently. From this safe distance, our injustices seem such incredible hypocrisies given the grand ideas to which we pledge allegiance. How easily they can be pushed aside, forgotten when fear and want prevail.

The vision is indeed magnificent liberty and justice for all though at times it appears weak-kneed.

Yet, I can only marvel at the wisdom of our founders. Whatever their personal beliefs, whatever their motives, the Constitution is the greatest outline for government ever composed by human minds. It is awesome; we should be proud.

I have a friend from Hong Kong, a native Chinese. He confided in me that he'd longed to be an American since childhood, since those early days when he splashed in the communal well of his humble village. He finally came here, still young and still a foreigner, married, and had a daughter, a child he was determined to raise as an American. Often, he would ask me for unneeded children's books, books that would fill his daughter's mind with all things red, white, and blue. "She must know everything," he had said. "She must learn everything an American child learns. You have so much to offer and I want her to have it all."

Nikola and Vanda and their children, escaping a crumbling Yugoslavia, were drawn to our oasis of relative peace. They left their shattered city for a picnic one day and never went back. Husband and wife, Christian and Muslim, they were an unholy union of the two kinds of countrymen who could no longer live side-by-side in their own land.

All eventually became citizens - new immigrants who showed me how good I have it.

But that was years ago, and the world has changed. Where once America was the guiding light, a beacon to the world, now there are grumblings and outright anger and we can't seem to understand why. Will the light be extinguished? To answer this, we need the courage to look at ourselves through others' eyes - the courage to look in the mirror.

We have begun to reveal a selfish, domineering face, casting a shadow over every corner of the earth. We have grown to be the mightiest political, economic, military force on the planet in all

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