Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day

It's MLK Day again and while it's always tempting to wax cynical about how far we Americans still are from Dr. King's original vision of a society in which people are judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character, it's hard for me to deny that a lot of progress has been made since 1968.

For many years, even liberal Democrats used to consider the idea of a black President as something that was unlikely to occur in real life within our lifetimes. But now it has.

That's not to say that there still aren't other problems that face us. Indeed, one could argue that merely electing a black President was a relatively simple task compared to what lies ahead. Nor do I care for the fact that it's becoming more and more fashionable to judge one by one's class. The more we Americans seem to embrace classlessness, the more obsessed we seem to be with class. And it doesn't help matters that the same Internet that has been frequently touted as a medium to inspire unity has just as often inspired division.

But I like to believe that we have more potential to solve these problems than any other country. Indeed, it's worth noting that many of the ideals we take for granted in this country aren't always shared by the rest of the world. (A fact that I learned myself when I traveled outside the country back in 1987.)

Perhaps I'm being overly optimistic. But sometimes optimism seems like a more realistic attitude than pessimism for no other reason that it's all too easy to think of reasons why such and such will never be accomplished. Accomplishing such and such anyway, of course, is a lot more harder.