I find myself in a bit of a mood today. I was born on the same day at Martin Luther King Jr. and for most of my life only recognized it as a day off of school. We saw movies and read stories about his life but it all seemed to be quite distant from the life that I lived growing up in a small town in Northern Illinois.

The older I get, the less the world seems to identify with the importance of remembering such a day. That, more than anything else, frustrates me. Not that I necessarily can relate more to the experiences of The Civil Rights Movement, which in many ways still seems like scenes from a horrid movie to me, but more that I respect what they did and what they had to overcome.

Yet in many respects, it is still aggravating that we need a day to remember the man. Perhaps because in remembering him many others (I.E. Rosa Parks and, in his later years, Malcolm X) get somewhat lost along the wayside. Or the notion that we need a specific reminder to think about the importance of the life that he lived.

I am however, very grateful that the day in which we remember the man who fought against tyranny, we don’t drudge up old hatreds that have been laid aside in hopes of a better future. Yet, I can’t help feeling that we are forgetting to honor the spirit that drove the man. A spirit that, with all it was, fought against injustice.

Abraham Lincoln had the same spirit and in many ways I feel ashamed that I cannot recite the Gettysburg Address. It was a piece of art, crafted with words, that shows a spirit we all can envy and embrace as a goal for ourselves.

Normally, I attempt to be funny but the blasé attempt at honoring this man and the fight he put up for not only himself but also those who were unable to fight on their own behalf is an affront to honor itself. I hope that we can each find a way to honor this man and his dream. A dream, I believe, was founding in the concept that morals supercede men and injustice is always the weaker enemy.

My tribute, hopefully a fitting one, doesn’t begin or end on the day we celebrate the life the was shortened by hatred, but elongated by vision and greatness, is an attempt to strive for the preservation the fundamental concepts that his sweat and blood were spent in the pursuit of, hoping that I can in similar fashion spend my life fighting for the greatness I too see in man and against the evil we all have been bound to.