"Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy." Martin Luther King, August 23, 1963

On Sunday, January 20, the day before the Martin Luther King national holiday, Vice-President Mike Pence, appearing of "Face the Nation," quoted a line (one of his "favorite" lines he said) from King's "I Have a Dream" speech

King delivered that speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Five years later he would join Lincoln and a holy host of others, known and unknown, loved and lost, in service to a cause for which they gave 'the last full measure of devotion."

It was, as we learned all too soon, "altogether fitting and proper" that King should have spoken those words in that place.

Pence tried to use King's words in defense of the determination of his beloved President and all too many members of his party to shut down the United States government rather than accept a proposal that did not accept Trump's inalterable demands for a $5.7 billion border "wall."

At press time his decision, backed by the GOP-controlled Senate, has deprived ca. 800,000 government workers of paychecks for well over a month, not to mention the damage done to every local economy in the nation when those families are left without pay.

One could argue, of course, that those government workers, thanks to King and Trump, now suffer equally now across lines of race, religion, gender and national origin.

True, in a sense . . . though one should never forget that those who opposed everything Martin Luther King stood for were, are, and by all accounts will remain, disproportionately supporters of Trump and Pence and the right wing of the GOP. (Not all Republicans feel that way, of course; but, statistically, nearly all who do voted Republican.

Pence, indeed, appears to have forgotten (if he ever knew them) the sentences immediately following the lines he quoted from King's speech:

"Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to open the doors of opportunity to all of God's children. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood."

And given the ongoing ill-mannered, ill-tempered, mean-spirited, ill-advised and (as a growing list of indictments, confessions, and convictions reveal) criminal behavior of the President, and all too many of his cabinet members, advisors, and family members Pence might well have taken to heart a few other words, from the same King speech, especially those about judging others by

"the content of their character."