Dr. King’s dream will be fulfilled only by stepping aside and allowing people to pursue their own happiness.  Stupid is not a race or a color, mind you, yet today the federal government would have you believe that whole classes of Americans are, indeed, too stupid to understand the risks they take when they pursue their happiness and must be divided out and protected from the consequences of their poor choices.

That doesn’t sound like liberty to me.

It is a tragedy of historic proportions.  A once great Republic brought to Her knees by deliberate distortions of Her Constitutional democracy now glances behind and, as Aristotle pointed out, sees despotism looming.  There was a reason that the United States government was divided into three parts, good reason that members of the House were elected directly by the people and members of the Senate by the legislature of each state and that reason is to insure that the deliberately-limited, enumerated powers of the federal government would contain it.  The popular election of Senators has loosened their responsibilities to the States and the individual and the results are the same as in all democracies:  a dangerous game of federal regulations in an attempt to legislate a minority’s opinion of what constitutes morality for some “greater good”.

Nothing comes without risk.  Sometimes great risk.  The road to socialism is a bloody one.  Just ask Mussolini, the darling of the earliest progressives like Woodrow Wilson and Winston Churchill, who called Il Duce “the great lawmaker”.  Look to Venezuela, to Cuba, to North Korea and tell me if it is truly possible to pursue your own, unique, individual happiness there.

I think not.

So as we celebrate the legacy of Dr. King today, we must also look to Massachusetts.  The birthplace of the American Revolution is now poised to fire yet another historic shot as her special election tomorrow to fill the seat held so long by progressive liberal Democrat Ted Kennedy has become a referendum of sorts.  Not a referendum on the Obama administration, as some would like you to believe (and thereby divide the American people once again), but a referendum on the United States Constitution.  The two leading candidates stand at opposing ends of the American political spectrum:  one a progressive liberal Democrat with the same bloody hands as Kennedy, the other a conservative Republican who believes it is the individual’s right to choose.  To their credit, the people of Massachusetts, liberal as they are, have seen the writing on the wall and rightly read its warnings, and in doing so their local battle has been thrust into the national spotlight.

To observe this battle is to see what has come to be called “the machine” overtly at work for the Democratic candidate, Martha Coakley.  Her campaign is defined by flying to Washington, D.C. to curry campaign contributions from lobbyists and having the president speak for her at a campaign rally when poll numbers show her “sure thing” has become anything but, while Republican Scott Brown simply travels across his state talking to the people.  And in doing this he has engaged the support of Americans in all states who not only reject this administration’s hell-bent usurpations of their liberties, but realize that the great expansion of the federal government engineered in the 1930s now means that every Senator’s actions will directly affect them.

Scott Brown has grassroots support, and despite the claims of the Obama 2008 campaign, the likes of which have not been seen as shown by Brown’s endorsement by the police union from which Coakley’s husband retired and the numerous SEIU members who carry her campaign signs only because they are being paid to do so but intend on voting for Brown.  While Coakley was in D.C. to beg for that special interest money to broadcast her negative ads (in which one didn’t even have “Massachusetts” spelled properly), Brown quietly raised a million dollars in a single day through donations made by concerned Americans across the country.

Frankly, it’s stunning to see this.  It means that the Founding Fathers were right, you know.  And that Dr. King knew it.

So today I have a dream.  A dream that tomorrow the good people of Massachusetts will fire one more “shot heard ’round the world”.  A loud, resounding shot for liberty.  For that is truly the finest way to honor the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King.