Memphis.  I remember that evening as if it were only days ago.  My parents had gone out to dinner with some friends from church.  It was the rare evening that my parents ventured out with out my older brother and baby sister.  My brother who was five years older became quiet and sullen.  As an eight year old I lacked the ability to grasp what Martin Luther King meant to our nation but I recall knowing that it was a bad day for good people.  When we listened to some of the programming on NPR as Carter and I ran our errands today I asked rhetorically why it is that the best of humanity is more frequently gunned down by sick individuals.  Why Martin Luther King, why Bobby and John Kennedy, why John Lennon?  And my eight year old son said to me, “Good people get killed by bad people but bad people don’t get killed because the rest of us are good.”  I like that kid.
John McCain, who voted against honoring Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday as a national holiday admitted yesterday that his vote was wrong.  Yeah, now he admits that.  I doubt many people won’t see through that desperate grasp for votes.  And Hillary who last winter said that it took a white man, President Lyndon B. Johnson, to finally win passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act made a trip to Memphis to shore up her campaign’s foibles with regard to race in this election cycle.  The continuing references to Rev. Wright and Obama not being where he is were it not for the color of his skin contradicts any credibility she might have with understanding the true spirit of Rev. King.  And so it goes. 
 
So I took the last couple of days off from work to spend time with my boys and work on the Comedy For Kids Tour that I have been putting together for the summer.  Two more clubs signed on to host our events where we hope to raise $5,000 for Children’s Miracle Network.  A four comic team and I will do benefit concerts in six Iowa cities over the summer donating our budding talents in exchange for ticket proceeds to be given to CMN.  As if this project didn’t give me enough good vibe already you should have seen the look on my youngest son’s eyes as we made our way into dimly lit night clubs to pitch our show yesterday.  I caught his chest swell up and a gleam in his eye on each occasion as shook hands with club owners that we would be doing our show.  If the memories he made yesterday live with him as vibrantly as those memories I hold of the interrupting news story about the assassination of Martin Luther King I think we are making progress in this world.  The world can be a scary place for an eight year old.  I hope by the time my boy has an eight year old of his own we have things figured out a little more than we do now.