This April 4 will be the 40th anniversary of the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. As much as anyone else in his generation King changed the culture for the better. That it came about largely because of his death shows that we humans can be perverse on occasion.

King was no saint. He had his foibles like every other human on the planet but this is no time to dredge through ancient history looking for evidence of King's failings. Everyone has them and everyone hopes that they aren't fodder for people with nothing better to do than gossip about other people. I suppose that if we were to do a comprehensive evaluation of King's accomplishments then it would be appropriate for us to examine both his good and bad points. However, that is beyond the scope of most endeavors such as this and I'm not the one to start throwing stones.

King is probably best known for his 'I have a dream' speech and the generations that have been born since his death can hardly envision the world as it was in 1968 that he and other blacks lived in. It truly was a different time.

A culture does not change overnight and it is not a smooth progress from on mindset to another. Some people would rather die than change their opinions about issues and there are some psychopaths that would kill to keep others from changing theirs.

If we Americans are truly to become the people envisioned in King's speech, people that judge a person on their behavior and their character, at some point we need to stop focusing on race. Yes, there were terrible crimes committed in the name of segregation and subjugation of black people. For the most part that is a part of our past.

There are those who are still determined that blacks and whites should not live together as brothers but they are a tiny minority and they can be dealt with on an individual basis. For the most part the civil rights struggles of the mid 20th century are over and Jim Crow segregation, repression of black voters and denial of civil rights lost.

They still exist in the fevered brains of some die-hard haters but for the vast majority of the population there is no overweening hatred of other cultures. Coexistence is not just a possibility, it is a reality for more than 300 million Americans.

If we keep looking for racial tension, it will never subside. The search will generate its own tension and will be self-perpetuating. At some point in time we as a people have to say: 'Yes, this is the promised land. We have reached the goal we have striven towards for so many years.'

Will America be perfect at that point? Certainly not. There are still many problems facing us and we will always have such problems. The point is that we cannot begin healing until we stop picking at the scabs of past injuries.

We have to get past our troubled, and troubling, racial past. If we do not it could be a stumbling block upon which our nation trips and falls. Abraham Lincoln said it best: "A nation divided against itself cannot stand."