How Do We Commemorate?

I was barely a spec in my parent's imagination on this day in 1963.

Like the sun rising over my balcony and the sun rising over that memorial, there was hope in the clouds.  Hope that thinking minds and feeling hearts would prevail over the vice grip of fear and hatred.  Hope.

The momentous event that has been immortalized through grainy black and white, replayed all this past weekend, commemorated again when hearts and souls gathered in a unified tapestry and outcry for again freedom, life, and liberty.  Once again.

Fifty years later, those who were children then look back out on the sea of time and realize that in some ways, it seems like time stood still, that the fight then is the fight now.

They told me that to everything there is a season and there is nothing new under the sun, read to me as a child, read myself those timeless words in the Book so many of us hold dear.  This fifty-year cycle of oppression and discrimination.

The ones who were murdered for the fight for life and justice, the one child innocently gunned down because of the fear and hatred of a grown man, freed of his crime by the state that took the lives of so many, discriminated and disenfranchised so many, that still, fifty years later want to shackle those of a darker hue.

How do we commemorate a dream deferred? The bounced check?