Cause I have a dream, my four little children, one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of that character.

I have a dream today.

Hey, everybody. I'm Mary Ann Williamson. Welcome to my podcast. On January 18th, we will be celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

And this is the time when we all think about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. We talk about him and hopefully we learn ever more to embody the principles for which he lived and died.

I'd like to tell you my own personal story related to Martin Luther King Jr. All of us have our own interface with his being and with his ideas.

And mine started when I was 15 years old and the day that he was assassinated.

I was doing what was usually happening in the afternoon. There wasn't 24 hour news at that time.

I was in the Dan watching television. I grew up in Houston and my mother was in the kitchen making dinner. This was a very normal routine in my household.

And in those days, breaking news meant something. It drives me insane. The way now, practically every newscast is is preceded by breaking news, keeping everybody in this heightened state of alert when the breaking news might be that Justin Bieber got a DWI or something.

I think it's a terrible dereliction of duty on the part of the news media that they for the sake of a hit, you know, in their ratings will keep everybody on the verge of their seats by saying it's breaking news even when it shouldn't be treated as something that important.

And I say that because when I was growing up, if you saw breaking news that meant everybody came to watch to see it's a breaking news.

And they came on and they said that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot and killed that day at the Lorraine motel in Memphis.

My mother turned around. She was watching a member. She had a towel in her hands at dish towel and she looked just stricken and very shortly after my father as this was the time when he become home from work, come to the utility room. We called it into the breakfast room.

My mother is just standing there stricken and I run up to my father and I say, daddy, daddy. Martin Luther King Jr. got killed. Dr. Martin Luther King somebody shot and killed Dr. Martin Luther King.

And I saw my father look out into the distance and he said, those bastards.

And I was like, what does he mean those bastards? Is he know who killed him? And of course, I would grow to understand that it was those bastards who killed him.

Regardless who killed him, it was those bastards. I remember that day almost as though it was yesterday. I had the same experience that everybody living old enough in America had.

It was, of course, we had a lot that went on that year. Later Bobby Kennedy would be killed as well. The years of tumult.

And then decades later, I'm writing a book called Healing the Soul of America. I knew that I wanted to talk about, I had written two books that were about spiritual things based on the course in miracles.

I had written a return to love and then I had written a book called A Woman's Worth. And a lot of people were surprised that she wants to write a book now about politics.

But I didn't just want to write a book about politics. I wanted to apply the same spiritual principles somehow to what I knew was going on collectively. I could see that the same psychological and emotional spiritual principles that prevail within the life of an individual.

Obviously, prevail within the life of a society. So two things went on for me in preparing to write that book. One was a deeper study of American history than I had ever had before, which is why my understanding of racial history in the United States became deepened and more convicted.

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