On Martin Luther King Day this year [2016], I was surprised to see the trash and recycling trucks clanking down my street in suburban St. Louis.

It seemed odd and rather inappropriate that the trash pickup and recycling workers would be required to work on the MLK holiday, as the holiday commemorates the life of Martin Luther King Jr., who was assassinated while in Memphis, trying to get better working conditions for that city’s sanitation workers.

Bankers got the day off. School children and teachers got the day off. Federal employees everywhere got the day off. But the workers who have a direct connection to the efforts of Dr. King did not get the day off here in Creve Coeur, Missouri [population 10,000+]. This is an injustice and an insult to sanitation workers, as well as to the legacy of Dr. King.

Does my little city council see the irony? I have learned that other St. Louis area municipalities [Kirkwood, for example] honored the holiday by suspending trash/recycling pickup. Why is Creve Coeur different?

When other federal holidays occur on my designated trash-collection day [Mondays, so it happens a lot], I get a notice from the city that pickup will take place on a day-late schedule. I can wait the extra day, no problem. But, if that accommodation can be made—as it is every year– for other federal holidays, why not for MLK Day?

If this is a matter of contractual terms with the vendor who does the trash and recycling pickup [Republic Services], the terms need to be renegotiated to honor MLK Day in the same way that New Year’s Day, Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day, and Christmas Day are. And, by the way, what does New Year’s Day commemorate [hangovers?] that makes it a more important holiday than Martin Luther King Day?

I’ve just written a letter expressing these thoughts to my two city council representatives, the mayor and the city manager, hoping that they’ll recognize the problem and do something about it. It’s just not right.

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Standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial before a throng of civil-rights activists in August of 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I have a dream” speech, one of the most powerful and enduring calls for equality and tolerance ever uttered on a public stage.

Dr. King proclaimed, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” With those words, Dr. King captured the most fundamental hope of every parent: that their children be allowed to follow their dreams without limit, free from presumptions about who they are or what they may achieve simply because of the color of their skin, their gender, their ethnic heritage, their religious affiliation, or their sexual preference.

For the sake of the children, Dr. King pleaded that day, America must live up to the most fundamental of its democratic ideals.

The questions raised by Dr. King’s speech fifty-three years ago are still as powerful and relevant today as they were then. They are questions worth considering on this holiday that honors the man and the legacy. Here are a few: Will we follow the path Dr. King and others forged and celebrate rather than denigrate the rich tapestry of our diversity? Or will we allow our differences to be cynically exploited to divide us? Can we overcome our fears and open ourselves up to the underlying content of a person’s character, no matter how different or foreign they seem to us? Or will we continue to believe falsely that the entirety of individuals can be summed up by the hoodies they wear on the street, or by the scarves wrapped around their heads, or by the manner in which they celebrate the dictates of their beliefs?

Below is a video of Muslim women from around the world speaking out about why they choose to wear hijab, what their choice does or does not say about them, and the challenges they face living as Muslims in Western societies.

I imagine Dr. King would have seen in these brave women echoes of the struggle he dedicated his life to. He certainly would have invited them to stand shoulder to shoulder with him on that stage because he would have understood that they too “have a dream.”

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Can I speak honestly about the new movie, “Selma?”

No doubt, it’s going to get a lot of support for an Oscar. Critics have raved about it, calling it a “must-see.” I agree—it’s definitely worth seeing. A lot of people are going to buy tickets because the subject matter is important—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic, game-changing, 1964 protest march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. Many movie-goers of a certain age—I’m one of them—will remember those events and the people who made them happen—and it will take us back to a time when the courageous struggle for voting rights and equality ultimately brought hope for a better America.

The acting is good. The cinematography is good.The story is, without question, one that needs to be told and retold—and one that younger people need to know about.

The most powerful scene in “Selma” is the depiction of the Selma-to-Montgomery march itself. The first effort to cross the bridge ended in a violent response by Alabama State Troopers and local police, which was broadcast widely on news reports and emblazoned on the front pages of newspapers around the world. A few days later, King and the other organizers marched again—this time joined by thousands of protesters—black and white—who streamed in from all over the U.S. I was 18 when I saw that, and today, it brought tears to my eyes again.

But here’s the but. “Selma” could have been better. I’m going to take some heat for criticizing this movie, I know, because this is one of those movies that we are expected to admire and love, carte blanche.

On the plus side, the movie purports to show us not just the march itself, but also the politics, negotiations, outrages and emotions that took place behind the scenes. I appreciate that effort, and it helped to get a glimpse of the context behind such a key event in a world-changing movement. [My spouse and I found ourselves mentally tagging the players: John Lewis, James Farmer, Viola Liuzzo, James Reeb, Hosea Williams, Andrew Young, Diane Nash —names we remember from news coverage of the day, but who were only tangentially identified in the script. Younger viewers unfamiliar with the details may wish they had a scorecard.]

But as the story progressed, I just didn’t buy the dialogue. In an attempt to ensure that the movie comes off as serious, the writers overwrote. Unfortunately, almost all of the characters speak in what sounds more like speeches than conversations. They’re being poetic, not talking. Everyone is grammatically correct and fluent, and most—even at their most heated moments—speak in paragraphs. It reminded me, in tone, of the stilted, overly patriotic language we used to endure in educational films about American history.

The most egregious example is the dialogue assigned to Tom Wilkinson, a British actor playing President Lyndon Johnson. Wilkinson is an excellent actor, and his American accent—although not Texan enough for Johnson—is fine. But it’s well known that Johnson was a very plain speaker who peppered his private conversations with all manner of profanities and homey analogies. In “Selma,” with the one exception of a curse-word-laden harangue with Alabama Governor George Wallace, Johnson is far too formal and diplomatic in his conversations. To me, that undermines the movie’s credibility.

All of that being said, I left the movie with several takeaways.

Regarding historical accuracy, I was surprised—echoing many critics–at how the writers characterized President Johnson as being reluctant to help Dr. King in his quest for voting rights. I am going to have to look that up, as well as whether Johnson—as is implied in the movie—enlisted the aid of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover [who saw Dr. King as a threat to his sense of order] to try to undermine the movement.

More broadly, I’m left with the lesson that police over-reaction has, through the years, been one of the most powerful, though unintentional, factors in the progress of reform movements. What got white America on the side of King and the protestors? Seeing Sheriff Bull Connor’s fire hoses and attack dogs. Watching Sheriff Jim Clarke’s baton-wielding, head-banging police attack peaceful marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. It was a lesson that King learned well and used to the civil-rights movement’s advantage.

And that lesson, unfortunately, is still in effect. We’ve seen it again and again: in the Ferguson and St. Louis County Police Departments’ over-reaction to protests in the death of Michael Brown; and in the viral video of the choke-hold killing of Eric Garner for protesting his arrest for selling loose cigarettes. Sadly, fifty years after TV viewers watched police billy-clubbing marchers in Selma, Alabama, we are still witnessing the same kind of behavior. You’d think law-enforcement officials would have learned, by now, that these actions are counter-productive. But, in some perverse way, people working for change can be thankful that they keep doing this stuff.

It’s sad, too, to realize that 50 years later, the big success brought about by the Selma march—the Voting Rights Act of 1965—has been, essentially, gutted by the conservative-led U.S. Supreme Court. The 1965 law required that lawmakers in states with a history of discriminating against minority voters get federal permission before changing voting rules. In 2014, Chief Justice John Roberts voted to gut the Voting Rights Act on the basis that “our country has changed,” and that blanket federal protection wasn’t needed to stop discrimination. States previously governed by the now-gutted section of the law immediately began rolling back voting rights.

We can view “Selma” as a history lesson. We can applaud Hollywood’s willingness to, at long last, support and possibly honor a movie that is at least somewhat realistic in depicting that painful period in 20th century America. But we must also see it as a cautionary tale: Things haven’t changed enough, and the struggle is far from over.

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Recently, historian Taylor Branch said, “Everybody says partisan gridlock is poisoning America, but nobody asks how much of it, underneath, is driven by race and racial resentment?” Speaking on CBS’ Face the Nation, Branch was joined by NAACP president Ben Jealous who said, “You know, when I was a journalist in Jackson, Mississippi, in the early 90s, my old publisher used to say, ‘The only problem with the New South is that it continues to occupy the same space and time as the Old South.’”

People in the know are not convinced that racism is dead in America, nor that the gridlock that Republicans have created in Congress emanates from different degrees of racial preference, if not prejudice.

The general consensus at the time of the 50^th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech was that the United States has made significant advancement in race relations over the past half-century, but that much still remained to be done.

However, at least one poll reports that race relations are declining. The NBC-Wall Street Journal reports:

Only 52 percent of whites and 38 percent of blacks have a favorable opinion of race relations in the country, according to the poll, which has tracked race relations since 1994 and was conducted in mid-July by Hart Research Associations and Public Opinion Strategies.

That’s a sharp drop from the beginning of Obama’s first term, when 79 percent of whites and 63 percent of blacks held a favorable view of American race relations.

President Obama weighed in on Branch’s assertion that partisan gridlock is driven in part by race and racial resentment. In an interview with Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff of PBS’s NewsHour, the President said, “The gridlock is connected to longstanding political views that [the government] helping those Americans who lack opportunities is bad for the economy.” He added that he doesn’t take it personally.

“There’s a line that’s drawn between the deserving poor and the undeserving poor. And you know, that, I think, has been fairly explicit in politics in this country for some time.”

The President’s answer is not surprising; it would be somewhat unseemly and certainly unproductive for the President to say that he agreed that our partisan gridlock is driven by race. We have at least advanced to a point where it is no longer an effective first strategy for African-Americans to describe themselves as a victims. The President was smart enough to not do that. But the reality remains that race is a big portion of the obstinance that Republicans have about giving due diligence to President Obama’s proposals.

Certainly, for the past half-century, problems related to race have been accompanied with a great cultural divide that still exists in our country. The divide had a powerful fissure in the 1960s, when issues of race were intermingled with those of music, fashion, life-styles, and war. At the time, Republicans were generally called “conservative” because that was their view on most cultural, economic, and political issues. They did not like the change. The new voices of the counter-culture of the left became an irritant to them.

The current partisan gridlock driven by the Republicans is not exclusively due to their racial preferences. Rather, it is somewhat of a passive-aggressive response to a half century of the Left presenting a firmly rooted opposition to conservatism. Many Republicans feel distant from cultural changes in the country including “the new Hollywood,” new genres of music, racial harmony, gender equality, technology, modern science, and growing agnosticism and atheism. A somewhat threatening act in any of these areas can pose a threat to conservatives, one that they often generalize and hold against “those other people,” whom they may call hippies, non-believers, blacks, socialists or a host of other names.

The fact that our President is African-American is a threat to many conservatives, and they shut down in trying to cooperate with him. This has been the case even when he actually advocates a policy than originated with Republicans. There are also some Americans who felt good voting for Barack Obama, thinking that it would be good for the country to elect an African-American president. However, their goodwill may have lasted through the 2008 election, but not enough to support him while in office.

The cultural disparity between the two parties forms the basis of our gridlock. Taylor Branch and others are giving us a deeper view into the divide. A first step for all of us to take is to recognize the divide for what it is and acknowledge that race is a vital component of it. If we can move away from the “New Denial,” we will move further in advancing Dr. King’s dream.

[See companion article: Walking on the thin line of race.]

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