Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream for this nation 57 years ago that all of us could stand to remember today.

In 1963, the civil rights leader stood proudly before a swelling crowd of more than 200,000 citizens from all walks of life gathered peacefully in the nation’s capital and shared his dream for America’s future.

His voice echoed across the National Mall stretching between monuments memorializing two of our greatest presidents — Washington and Lincoln — as he told the world, “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal.’”

King dreamed of a nation where people were judged not by the color of their skin, or where they grew up, or their religious beliefs, or any of the things about us that make us unique as individuals, and yet the same by virtue of growing up in a nation built on a foundation of embracing differences.

And yet here we are — approaching six decades later — our great nation seems as divided today as it was in 1963.

Are we really any closer to seeing one another as equals?

Or is the sad reality that we still put people in silos and judge them based on our differences? And are those breaches between us even greater than the racial difference destroying our nation at the height of the Civil Rights Movement?

Dr. King envisioned a time in our country’s future when “we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands ... ”

We have to ask ourselves what this great leader would think of the recent rash of ethnic and religious attacks and hate rhetoric dominating our news.

Dr. King hoped for a world in which his children would be judged by their character, and not by the color of their skin. And yet the past decade has been fraught with a brave new world of discrimination beyond just the color of a person’s skin to their gender, their age, their sexual orientation, their culture, their socio-economic background.

Just one day after we celebrate one of our nation’s greatest uniters, our Senate embarks on a presidential impeachment trial as our already divided nation heads into yet another divisive presidential campaign.

One has to wonder what Dr. King would think of modern day America in light of all this.

He would remind us of a dream — his dream — and urge us all to remember our divided past so as to not repeat it.

A dream of uniting the country and her people to “hew out of a mountain of despair a stone of hope.”

A dream where strong faith and conviction shared among those united people “transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.”

— ALH