“We still have a mission and that mission that we have today is to be the dream,” Patrick Jackson, member and worship leader at Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church told a crowd at a Monday Martin Luther King Jr. Dream Week event. “Be the dream by holding the country to its own creed.”

We hope that everyone, both in the room that day and well beyond its walls, can take that message to heart.

We are thankful for the hard work of the volunteers and leaders who put together this year’s calendar of Dream Week events. It is an important milestone in our nation’s history to commemorate, and their efforts are critical to how our communities commemorate it.

We are particularly grateful for this event, on which the Wednesday edition of the Sun-Gazette reported and the James V. Brown Library hosted.

It is important to include the children in our communities in remembering and honoring the work of King and the civil rights movement. Just as it is important for young people to recognize Veterans Day and Memorial Day, and for many of the same reasons.

The freedom their families cherish is the result of ongoing work and ongoing sacrifices. As much as liberty, God-given as it is, should be a default for people throughout our nation and our world, the sad reality is that it is not and it never has been.

Men and women had to persevere to secure our God-given rights, sometimes against foreign adversaries and ideologies, for which we express our gratitude on Veterans Day and Memorial Day.

And sometimes against repugnant philosophies and practices like segregation and discrimination, practices we cannot blame on distant terrors far over our borders. Philosophies found native in the flaws of our own culture.

It is important to have occasions throughout the year to express our gratitude for the men and women who resisted those philosophies and who taught their neighbors and their communities to triumph over those philosophies as well.

And to rededicate ourselves to confronting the remnants of those philosophies and defeating their influence in our nation’s future.