We don't trust ourselves to remember, and so we demand, in various ways, that everybody else stay put, not move forward.
The fear of forgetting or even diluting memory is understandable. Some people fear that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. has been forgotten.
And the fear is partly what's behind the debate over the future of the World Trade Center site and even the survivors' opposition to a new viewing platform. Some survivors and those who lost loved ones say it's a sacred site that belongs to their memories, not strangers.
But there they are so wrong. The site is no more sacred than, say, Washington Square Park or the City Hall area or Central Park. They are all burial grounds that have been transformed in time to serve the living. But we haven't forgotten, those of us inclined to remember. What happened on that land is still a part of the story of our quest for liberty and justice, mistakes and all.
With King, it is more problematic. Tuesday would have been his 73rd birthday, and next Monday will be the holiday set aside in his honor. But we remember him, I hope, not because he is now a holiday, but because his message remains relevant to us today.
Among the issues on his agenda at the time of his assassination on April 4, 1968, when he was 39, were the continuing efforts to desegregate if not fully integrate American society and the quest for peace.
Open a newspaper as recently as Sunday nearly 34 years after we last heard him tell us of his visions for the future and what do we find? A front page full of news from the war.
King longed for, and gave his life for, the ideal of a just world where the Osama bin Ladens or even the Louis Farrakhans would find no fertile ground for their messages because all humankind would be treated as members of an extended family, and large segments of them would not see themselves as losers in a great grab for largess won by the relatively upstart United States.
"Man is a child of the God, made in His image, and therefore must be respected as such," King said in a sermon delivered four months before his death. "Until men see this everywhere, until nations see this everywhere, we will be fighting wars." At home, in places like Yonkers, and abroad, in places like Afghanistan.
Those viewing platforms at Ground Zero are as much a challenge for us not to forget as is King's holiday. On Dec. 11 90 days after the end of the world as we Americans knew it President Bush recalled: "A great writer has said that the struggle of humanity against tyranny is the struggle of memory against forgetting. When we fight terror, we fight tyranny, and so we remember."
I'd add that when we fight all acts of inhumanity, then we remember. And we move toward that day that King longed for, when we can say: "Free at last. Free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"
E.R. Shipp's e-mail address is eshipp@edit.nydailynews.com.
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