"I have a dream." (And today's confederacy of dunces can't turn it to a nightmare.)

On August 28, 1963, Ursula Bird King Rodgers fought her way through the traffic, heat, and hoards of people to the Lincoln Memorial. She felt strongly that a great moment in history was about to take place, and she wanted her 11-yr-old son Gary to see it. Forty-seven years later, my husband remembers everything about the day. It meant a lot to him, and he was sickened to hear about Glenn Beck's rally taking place at the Lincoln Memorial today. For me, it's in the bucket with both the mosque and the strip club adjacent to Ground Zero: the freedoms we cherish sometimes translate to another person's right to be incredibly tacky.

With breathtaking hubris and disrespect, Beck called out his faithful and preached to his choir. Stephen Colbert describes the message as "crank up the crazy and rip off the nob." Gary succinctly describes Beck as "a master of huxterism" and wrote this to the Houston Chronicle today:

This pudgy blowhard has conscripted a day in the social fabric of our nation that he has no depth or wisdom to appreciate. His rants of anger and hatred, his philosophy of exclusion are anathema to the very precepts spoken to and of by Dr. King these many years ago. I was there, and it shaped my life. Today there will be Beck and Palin...and the weight and influence of the entire right-wing media making this a circus celebrating...what? Hope and vision? No, war and military and exclusion. Beck himself is an expert on the later and has read at least one book on the military.

But enough about Beck and the rest of the blatherati. What matters today is the message that resonates through decades, not the squawking hate yak that blips the airwaves and fades with whatever was on the shelf last week at WalMart.

These are the words that opened a little boy's mind and shaped a man's life: