Earlier this week, the Broomfield Enterprise published a column I wrote about the legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It turned out okay. That is to say I don’t hate it completely. I spent a decent amount of time on it, but didn’t obsess over it too badly. I revised it several times, but when I clicked “send,” I let it go, which is major progress for me. #TheEndofMyWritersAngst.
Anyway, since it was my first newspaper column in a while, and because I’ve changed quite a bit since my last published columns, I wasn’t quite sure how this new attempt would turn out. It did feel good to write for the newspaper medium again. The hardest part? Paring the column down to about 500 words.
But this morning, I thought, “Hey, I have a blog where I can post some of the stuff I left out of the Enterprise version!” So here are a couple snippets:
Before the column turned serious, I made a few wry comments in my consideration of King’s name and his little-known name change:
For my part, I would claim King as my namesake, but alas, my mother named me instead after a nice neighbor-friend of my brother’s, and then she scrabbled in an extra ‘r’ and replaced the ‘i’ with an ‘o.’ (Much to my surprise, I later discovered Hungarians also end Martin with ‘on,’ as in ‘Marton.’)…
And later, after trying to get closer to the stated theme of the column (“On Faith”), I revisited King’s emphasis on a certain kind of active faith — he was a Baptist minister, after all:
In fact, in his famous 1963 March on Washington speech King repeatedly used the sing-song phrase “with this faith,” culminating in, “…With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day…
And to that I say, “Amen! And may the dream live on.”
