It was a hard year. In many ways, 1968 was a year of a nation struggling with itself.

The civil rights cause was inexorably moving us toward social justice.

And there was division in the land.

We were sinking ever deeper into the tragic quagmire of Vietnam.

And there was division in the land.

A president had been killed five years earlier, and five years later a civil rights leader who sought justice for the disenfranchised was killed, and a U.S. Senator who was a candidate for his party’s nomination for president was killed. It was 1968.

There was discontent, anger, great sadness in our country.

And there was division in the land.

And in 1978, 10 years later, I wrote a column titled “Morning Stars Will Sing …” I’m sure it was little noted nor long remembered, which is probably the case for most of my weekly writing endeavors.

Please allow me to share a portion of that column with you now.

It began “This is our faith. The psalmist is right. Midnight may come. ‘Weeping may tarry for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.’ With this faith we will be able to move out of the dark and desolate midnight, and to a beautiful daybreak. With this faith we will be able to adjourn the councils of despair and bring new light into the dark chambers of pessimism. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.

“With this faith we will be able to transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows and speed up that day when ‘every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low; and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain; and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.’ And when this happens, morning stars will sing together, and the sons of God will shout for joy.”

So spoke the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. those many years ago, as he, in his eloquence, and in the didactic eloquence of scripture, gave voice to a hope for a better world, a better land.

And now, here we find ourselves 50 years on, and …  there is division in the land.

I concluded that column by “Change must first begin with the desire for change. And that must come from within: from the mind … and the heart.”

APROPOS — “There is a destiny which makes us brothers; none goes his way alone.”

— Edwin Markham