THE JOURNEY CONTINUES: Guest Column by Jerry Bullock
Editor's Note: Guest Columnist today is Jerry Bullock. He is no stranger to the San Marcos Daily Record since he wrote the column "Life's Like That" for over 30 years. He is a Retired Air Force Colonel, an ordained Baptist minister, a professional counselor, a military historian and speaker. His column was forwarded to Brother Jim and is reprinted here with his consent:
"I am proud to be an American. This month The United States of America was 244 years old. In 1863 President Abe Lincoln, speaking at Gettysburg, said: 'Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.' He had signed the Emancipation Proclamation. making all slaves free.
...They were free to enjoy the bounty of this new land. However, for the next one hundred years, White men, Southern Democrats, said: "as long as they stay in 'their' place"...and made sure Blacks living in the south did. Through roadblocks to voting; to being sent to sit in the back of the bus; to separate drinking fountains and restrooms, and to separate (and unequal) public schools and to many other legal ploys, Black people and their children were denied full participation in American.
100 years after Lincoln signed the proclamation, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and gave us all a dream in which he spoke of a new America that would begin to live out those words! If you have never heard the speech, I urge you to look up on YouTube this stirring speech--it might change your own outlook. Dr. King spoke out against police brutality. Now, fifty-seven years later, we are still making headlines with white and black police officers on the streets of our nation's towns and cities enacting unconscionable acts of brutality! I'm sorry, friends, but we cannot turn our heads in platitudes and apologetics and ignore 67 years of Black people being treated as if they are runaway slaves.
I appreciate Pastor Paul Buntyn's columns and his honest sharing. We must never forget 'we are all created in God's image', and if we follow His guidance and His love, each of us finds our own way to loving our neighbor as we love ourself! We may have come a long way toward equality for all people; but we have a long way to go. I think we may once again be at the point of asking, "Can a nation so conceived and so dedicated long endure?" Two hundred forty-four years is not a long time in the life of nations. England has churches built 400 years before America was born. However, if we are asking the same questions fifty years from now, the answer to the survival of America is probably NO! My Dream for my 20 grandchildren and 16 great-grandchildren is simple..."one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all."
