Welcome to the Commune podcast. This is Jeff Krasna.

So many of you may receive my weekly Sunday commusing article, where I address a breadth of issues from the spiritual to the socio-political.

And on occasion, I will also record an audio version of these articles and release it as a

bonus episode. So today's recitation focuses on Martin Luther King on the anniversary of his birthday,

and I discuss a new initiative called Make America Purple, a platform that connects people across the political divide in one-on-one

conversations. If you are interested in receiving my weekly article, sign up at one commune.com.

And if you're not totally sick of me, you can follow me on Instagram at Jeff Krasno.

So, without further ado, here's this week's

commusing entitled, What Are We Not Hearing?

When I was growing up in Connecticut, my family rented a house every summer in Grafton, Vermont for the month of July.

We packed up our boxy Ford-Farmont station wagon that supported a stripe of wood paneling around its belly.

It was kind of like driving a piece of furniture. The journey up the Merritt Parkway and then US91 seemed to stretch out in front of us

forever. But in these simpler days, time was less of a commodity. Convenience had yet to render

it scarce. Now we're so preoccupied with losing time

that we often misspend it. While there was no binging the office on iPads in the backseat,

we did have a cassette player, and it became a yearly ritual on this crawl up the Northeast

corridor for my father to pop in a crusty analog

tape of America's greatest speeches. There was John F. Kennedy's inaugural address from

1961. You know the one. Ask not what your country can do for you. And his brother Robert's speech from the Democratic National Convention of 1964.

But no oratory could hold a candle to the soaring sermon of Martin Luther King

from the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963. As a boy sprouting in the suburbs,

I had never heard anyone speak in this manner. It sounded like church, though it bore no

...