A Belated Happy Birthday to Martin Luther King, Jr. (January 15, 1929)

The fact that I share a birthday week with MLK makes up (in spades) for the fact that I share the day itself with Rush Limbaugh.

I just heard on NPR (All Things Considered) that a recording of a previously unknown speech by him has just been found in India, from when he toured that country in honor of Gandhi, in 1959.

The NPR site does not have the audio up, yet, so I can't relisten and get an exact quote right. But in the clip that they played, Mr. King said that in this age of rockets and missles, the choice for nations isn't "Between Non-violence and violence" but "between nonviolence and nonexistence."

Can anyone blame me for seeing that as a poignant commentary on current events, 50 years later?

Also, while his birthday itself was yesterday, the national celebration of his birthday is Monday (we are, in this country, addicted to the three-day weekend). And on Tuesday, Barack Hussein Obama takes the oath of office and becomes President.

...Wow.

Wow.

I'm really wishing I could talk to Dad about the U.S. Airways (controlled) crash that happened yesterday.

Most of his flights were out of that airport...

Two things that he would often tell me echoing around my head:

"Airplanes and boats, if they're rigged right, have 'Positive Stability' -- they're designed to be well balanced, and will right themselves if you just let go. ... People are mostly like that, too."

And:

"I would never fly with anyone who said 'God is my co-pilot;' when you're the captain of a plane, it's your responsibility to be in the here and now, and take full responsibility for your own actions. Anyone who would hand their power off to a 'higher being' has no place flying a plane."

(Quotation marks are rhetorical; it's the gist of what he said that I remember.)