I took this photo two years ago of the Washington Monument and Reflecting Pool from the top step of the Lincoln Memorial. Look closely at the people.

When I turned around to face Mr. Lincoln, this scene presented itself.

And then I looked down at my feet.

I was standing on the spot Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his I Have a Dreamspeech in 1963, with those final rousing words pointing to a distant future,

When all of God’s children, Black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty, we are free at last.

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My friend Steve and his wife Katie adopted four South Korean children thirty-five years ago. A week ago, one of his kids, Nikki, was shopping at Walmart when a young man in the parking lot yelled, “Why don’t you go back to China.”

One ignorant guy, right? And The Confederate Flag flying prominently from the white pick-up I saw yesterday, that’s just one truck. Maybe it was the same guy.

Yesterday, I was shopping for a hat and picked up this one for 6 dollars.

It’s a muted version of the Gadsden Flag with a complicated history you can read about here. Lately, however, this symbolism has been adopted by White Supremacist groups.

Three vignettes.

Each is in the open. Out of the shadows.

Should we be worried?

Is America moving closer to or further away from King’s free at-last vision for all God’s children?

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Four years ago, Rebecca and I visited another memorial. In the photo below, we are sitting behind the podium Adolph Hitler spoke from 1933–1938 at massive Nazi Rallies in Nuremberg, Germany. I don’t have a picture, but on that day in front of us where thousands of Seig Heil saluters once marched were a bunch of kids on skateboards.

The Nazi Rally Grounds are kept in the form of preserved decay as part of an extraordinary Documentation Museum. The Nazi vision of an “exclusionary society” now lies on the ash heap of history.

Could something like that happen here?

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America today has more immigrants than any country in the world. (source) Fifty million of 330 million were born in another country, with Mexico, China, and India as the top three countries of origin. Most Americans, 59% to 34%, believe immigrants strengthen our country. (source)

These are good omens — one of my intellectual Political Science mentors, E.E. Schattschneider, wrote that “Democracy begins as an act of imagination about people.” Not people as an abstraction but the “warm, breathing, feeling, hungering, loving, hating, aspiring, living being with whom we identify ourselves.”

And he continued, “The democratic concern for people is not selective…it takes a lot of indiscriminate affection for people as people to run a democracy.”

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I was born in 1949, when America was a different country. With few exceptions, white Protestant males ran its institutions. Silenced voices hid its diversity. For many, America was easier to love.

The sixties changed all that. Laws were passed, opening America’s doors to Asians and those south of its border. Civil Rights legislation and Supreme Court decisions gave voice to African Americans. Other movements of out-groups followed.

White male monopolies slowly disintegrated. But not without a fight.

That we are still in the middle of, that drives America’s politics and explains its divisions.

Two years ago, as a white male at the Lincoln Memorial, I was in the minority. Perhaps even before I die, my race will lose its majority status across this land. In 1867, former slave Frederick Douglass gave an extraordinary speech titled “Composite Nation.” In it, he argued against a law that excluded immigrants from China. He said:

I want a home here not only for the negro, the mulatto, and Latin races; but I want the Asiatic to find a home here, both for his sake and ours.

I don’t want my great-grandchildren to be skateboarding on the decayed steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

We’ve got work to do.

Down the path of indiscriminate affection.

For all America’s people.