Only Their Eyes Be Opened

By Megan

Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man’s sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true. — Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

He had a way of putting things into words that described a HUGE, universal, hideously human problem in a direct, succinct way. He was a true leader, and his life and works left beautiful, resolute, positive fingerprints on our world and paved the way for my husband’s success, for our marriage, and for our children’s confident, carefree inclusion in society. I am grateful to him and those who sacrificed alongside him. So grateful.

My daughter knows who he is. He’s Marfin Lufer King, and according to her, and he is “The best King ever.” But what she doesn’t know … the real, deep, deadly problems that aroused his Dream, the hatred and pain and suffering that he fought to end … leaves me feeling haunted. How can I tell her that in her grandparents’ lifetime people were readily excluded, hated, killed for having skin the color of her father’s skin? That flesh tone was not-so-long-ago a societally-sanctioned determiner of who had and who had not and who was considered intelligent and capable and worthy and who was not? And that half of her is what wasn’t? I ache inside already at what my children will feel when they really understand that, how they’ll assimilate the knowledge and what it will do to them.

I tiptoe around it. When I hear her chatter light-heartedly about him I think she should know — I should tell her the whole truth — but then again I ache to protect her simple definitions. I’m glad she knows his face when she sees images and references to him. I’m glad she only wonders “where’s his crown?”

But I’m already preparing for the days we’ll tell our children more about him and what happened to him, and an important layer of their innocence will be stripped away. I pray it makes them stronger and more resolute in the values we’re teaching them. I pray that only their eyes will be opened to hatred’s ugliness and confusion, and not their hearts.

Megan blogs much more light-heartedly at FriedOkra.