A good year to reflect on Jefferson and King

The best piece of persuasive writing - ever, in my view - was penned by Thomas Jefferson, before Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and other meddlesome Continental Congress delegates started watering it down.

Jefferson's original version of the Declaration of Independence remains a brew of fire and righteous indignation, a first draft writ hard from one man's soul during the tumultuous, tenuous time of the nation's pre-birth.

Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers and Mothers (don't forget Abigail Adams) could have died for their words, for their actions. And they knew it.

But they pressed on, relentlessly stirring the pot, confident that a mess of a present could be knitted loosely enough together to hold firm until future leadership wove in newer, stronger threads.

Abraham Lincoln added on. And died for his trouble. And so did the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. - his oratory as masterful as Jefferson's pen - whose life we celebrate Monday.

So you think the nation's a mess? With red states and blue states; Americans at each other over health care. The nation has endured worse, far worse. And it has - and will - endure.

Still, especially on this day, there remains plentiful reason for us to reboot, reconsider and rethink and commit to rebuild.

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After the Arizona massacre, we need to remind ourselves that it takes strength to move forward.

There are, to paraphrase King, mountains plentiful to be climbed. So, how do we get there?

Let's start, like Jefferson, like King, paying plentiful attention to their masterworks, their genius in using words to bring disparate factions together into a stronger nation.

Neither minced meaning. Jefferson's indictments of King George III's actions against his fellow countrymen sting, like bursts of rocket fire, from his work.

And King, especially during the last years of his life, began veering toward more strident positions on everything from what he called the "maddening" Vietnam War to the need for economic as well as racial equality.

Having a strong opinion was never enough for either wordsmith.

That's a point I like to make when teaching persuasive writing to grade school children. When opinion is everything - School uniforms? No school uniforms? - all the sides have to do is clash and beat the stuffing out of each other.

There always comes a point where the fight, not the point, matters.

Jefferson and King - who was, in a way, assuming leadership on the sticky public policy issue of slavery dating back to Jefferson - were smart enough, sophisticated enough to realize that differences of opinion don't matter. He who persuades wins. And all that can take is getting the other side to listen. From there, the sifting, the sorting, the knitting of both perspectives can begin.

And so it is that this day - in this, a hard year come early in America because of a gunman in Arizona - deserves some reconsideration. Some have worked to change this from a holiday to a national day of service. How about a national day of serving the nation through words, through getting past opinions, to listening rather than shouting.

It worked for Jefferson, for Lincoln and for King. And in working for them, it worked for America too.

It's time to add more strands to their work, to keep building rather than tearing each other apart.