Bush leads King groundbreaking ceremony

As Bush leads King groundbreaking ceremony, I recall my own initial opposition to this idea. As a disgusting godless liberal -- as America's most auspicious anorexic Ann Coulter would describe me -- I was initially opposed to this idea of an MLK monument on the national mall for one simple reason: the mall honors PRESIDENTS, not just Americans of special import. There is no room for Franklin, or Edison, or Einstein, and there should be no room for MLK. It's not a mall of martyrs and not a mall of market-makers. It's a mall of U.S. presidents.

As is often the case, I ruminated upon my belief to find out how deeply I held this position. As I dwelt upon the role of slavery in building the foundations of the much heralded American economy and the role slavery in the lives of those presidents who are enshrined on the mall, my convictions began to crumble.

The most prominently honored presidents on the national mall presided over a nation with a Great Moral Blot: Slavery. Because they presided over a nation that accepted such a fundamental moral evil and PARTICULARLY a nation that claimed All Men Were Created Equal, it is fitting for this blot to be prominently an irrevocably acknowledged in the midst of those "great Americans" who were apparently not great enough to see the hypocrisy of their own positions.

The era of slavery in America is as inexcusable, inexplicable, and incomprehensible as the Nazi extermination of Jews. Slavery truly was the American Holocaust, but still, hundreds of millions of non-black Americans (not just white, but all non-black), have not studied enough African American history to fully understand how bad slavery was for millions.

Because it makes us feel more comfortable, we all like to point out the poster-children for the oxymoron of positive slavery; those owner's who were indeed generous, not abusive, and even the educators who made liberation finally possible. However, nothing can make amends for the lynchings, for the millions and millions of hidden sins and slayings of American slaves.

Nothing can make amends, but something can make a difference: a monument on the national mall. By building this monument, future Americans, like today's misguided retro-neo-nazi's, can never discount or deny that horrible history.

Like German laws that permanently forbid even the appearance of Nazism, in this permanent U.S. memorial, we are not codifying our shame but acknowledging our nobility. We are acknowledging the nobility of an imperfect man who weighed in on the other side of the scales of justice, relative to the other imperfect men on that mall.

In the MLK monument, we enshrine the collective noble spirit of an imperfect people to never think higher of ourselves that we ought; a nation that acknowledges its faults and weaknesses as well as its strengths; a people committed to corrective action in the face of injustice; we reiterate the Original Socialist Pledge of building and sustaining one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

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