Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2010. Where are we now? And how much farther must we go?

I guess the question to ask is have we as a nation reached the "promised land"?

We have a man in the White House who would seem to be the very symbol of what Martin Luther King Jr., and the Civil Rights movement hoped to achieve.

President Obama holds the highest office in the land, and wields enormous power and influence, which he unfailingly uses it in the attempt to better the lives of Americans.

He is a man of compassion, who reaches out to those who are suffering, NOT because it is the political appropriate thing to do but because he relates to them and to their suffering.

He took on this job after our previous administration drove this country into a ditch, and he has carefully attempted to rescue and repair our nation in the face of withering criticism, from the same people who turned a blind eye to the criminal activity of his predecessor. And he does so with a calm dignity that serves as an inspiration to all who struggle to overcome the adversity in their life.

And President Obama has brought the racism which Martin Luther King Jr. fearlessly battled, and which ultimately took his life, back out into the open so that we can finally face this darkness in our American soul and eradicate it forever. This racism does not hide behind white hoods, and flaming crosses, it is carried proudly on signs proclaiming that the first African American president is not just a "Niggar" (Sign proudly carried by Dale Robertson, a Tea Party activist who operates TeaParty.org),


but also a "Muslim", a "fascist", a "Marxist", a "socialist", a "Nazi", and every other negative prejorative they can imagine.

But in their desperation to reveal the "truth" about our President, they instead reveal the truth about themselves, and about a part of America that many of us believed no longer existed.

So have we reached the "promised land"? No. We have not.

But Barack Obama represents one giant leap forward. And the evidence to support that conclusion is written on the signs of chronically undereducated teabaggers all over this country. Their real fear is that he is not any of the things they accuse him of being. Their real fear is that he will be a great President and they will be faced with the reality that a black man can lead this nation as well, if not better, than the white men who came before. They will have to accept that a man cannot be judged simply by the color of his skin, but instead by the content of his character.

And THEN we will finally have reached the "promised land" that the Reverend King longed for all those many years ago.