We have despaired the last couple of years over the cantankerous nature of our politics. I will tell you it was worse in 1968.

I was upstairs in my room doing homework when the telephone rang. There were only two telephones in the house, one in the kitchen and one in my parents’ bedroom. My mother answered the telephone, the one in the bedroom, where she was – I distinctly remember – folding laundry.

The call was for me. It was my friend Mark (I cannot remember his last name).

Mother handed me the receiver.

“Hello?”

“Jarvie, hi, it’s Mark.”

“Hi, Mark.”

“Someone just shot Martin Luther King.”

I do not know what possessed Mark to call me that day with the news. We were both 10 years old, still scribbling in the margins of our social studies books, not particularly concerned with social justice except as it impacted life on the playground. There were no Black Americans in Wilton, Conn., at the time.

My mother went immediately to the television set, saying to me, “Why did he feel he had to call you with such dreadful news?”

It remains a mystery. But that is where I was when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Robert Kennedy would be cut down a few months later. The Democratic Convention in Chicago that summer would turn to riot, Nixon would be elected, the war in Vietnam would rage on.

I have no standing on the matter of racial injustice. I come from a privileged class. Sifting through the rhetoric of the past couple of years, however, we hear inklings of a new kind of oppression – cultural oppression – leading to angry voices, intractable politics, new kinds of fear, all of it tempting violence in the public square.

On the occasion of the holiday in his honor, perhaps it is a good time for a few words from the man who walked (many walks) this ground before, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.:

“Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality. “

“Whatever your life's work is, do it well. A man should do his job so well that the living , the dead, and the unborn could do it no better.” 

“I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.” 

“I refuse to accept the idea that the ‘isness’ of man’s present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal ‘oughtness’ that forever confronts him.”

“Never succumb to the temptation of bitterness.”

This holiday weekend is a memorial to King and a reminder of our ongoing struggle as a nation to overcome prejudice. In that respect, it is worth identifying with the holiday as the one uniquely dedicated to our diversity and our travails and successes holding it together.

“We may have all come on different ships, but we're in the same boat now,” King said.

It is worth celebrating.

Jarvis Coffin and his wife Marcia owned New Hampshire’s oldest inn, The Hancock Inn, during which time he wrote a popular newsletter for the inn’s mailing list. Retired from innkeeping, he now writes full-time, mostly essays on rural life and fiction. You can reach him at huntspond@icloud.com, and visit postcard-from-monadnock.ghost.io to keep up with his other musings on the Monadnock Region.

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