…below, some also-serious stuff.

I’m at this moment watching ABC’s Martin Luther King anniversary special. At last, a contemporary mainstream media source has depicted King as more than just the thinking-outside-the-box CEO’s role model he’s been depicted as in most January MLK Day billboards. He was a fighter, a tactician, and a truer American patriot than the Alabama government neanderthals who’d violently held on to segregation.

The subsequent two years’ worth of civil rights legislation broke the Democratic Party’s “solid South.” George Wallace’s third-party Presidential campaign in ’68 (the last such campaign to win any Electoral College votes) threw the White House to Nixon. Today, a more-or-less thinly disguised variant of Wallace’s old, cynical fear-mongering and race-baiting stands at the heart of Republican demagoguery.

King was no mere “dreamer.” His message is no mere relic from a long-gone era. We need to heed it more than ever.