Monday is Martin Luther King Jr. Day –which means many will enjoy a three-day weekend. It is essential we do more than take extra time away from work or school on that day. More than half a century after King’s assassination, our battered and divided country MUST spend time considering whether we are living up to King’s dream, and honoring the fight for which he lost his life.

Outmoded and hateful ideas about the change King was trying to bring have been slow to fade — much slower than even he might have predicted. He knew HE wouldn’t get to the promised land. He probably never imagined we would still be so far from it.

In fact, it was not until 1986 that MLK Day was officially observed as a federal holiday. Even then, there were individual state holdouts into the early 1990s.

Today, too many still feel comfortable publicly expressing nonsensical and dangerous socio-cultural ideas that continue to hinder our march toward King’s dream that “one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.”

Along with that dream, King hoped for a fierce sense of urgency that “all of God’s children, Black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing … Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty, we are free at last.”

And yet here we are. He voiced that hope 100 years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation … and nearly 60 years ago.

How much longer?

On Martin Luther King Day, we’ve got to think about what each of us can do to ensure another 50 or 100 years does not go by with our nation still wandering in the wilderness. What can we do to speed our arrival in that promised land, now?