untitled rant

Thanks to a break in classes for various symposia, I’ve been sitting around thinking about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and wondering. Wondering stuff like, how is that a man once considered an Enemy of The State now has a paid federal holiday named in his honor? If Dr. King were a figure of recent history, would a holiday have resulted from his actions and his death? (e.g., would King George have made this a holiday?) How is it that listening to a speech recorded 40 years ago and stoke the fire the belly to go out and do something right now (granted, it doesn’t take much to do this in my case) while speeches made by our current leaders on a good day only hint at substance and coherency? This is how a real leader speaks:
(excerpted from MLK's Nobel lecture)

The time has come for an all-out world war against poverty. The rich nations must use their vast resources of wealth to develop the underdeveloped, school the unschooled, and feed the unfed. Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation. No individual or nation can be great if it does not have a concern for "the least of these". Deeply etched in the fiber of our religious tradition is the conviction that men are made in the image of God and that they are souls of infinite metaphysical value, the heirs of a legacy of dignity and worth. If we feel this as a profound moral fact, we cannot be content to see men hungry, to see men victimized with starvation and ill health when we have the means to help them. The wealthy nations must go all out to bridge the gulf between the rich minority and the poor majority.

In the final analysis, the rich must not ignore the poor because both rich and poor are tied in a single garment of destiny. All life is interrelated, and all men are interdependent. The agony of the poor diminishes the rich, and the salvation of the poor enlarges the rich. We are inevitably our brothers' keeper because of the interrelated structure of reality. John Donne interpreted this truth in graphic terms when he affirmed:

No man is an Iland, intire of its selfe: every
man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the
maine: if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea,
Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie
were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends
or of thine owne were: any mans death
diminishes me, because I am involved in
Mankinde: and therefore never send to know
for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for thee.

How is it that despite the myriad fronts on which Dr. King worked to promote peace, justice and equality, his message has been boiled down to “I have a dream?” The Boy notes that this is a Reagan holiday. Reagan, who was urged by his handlers to kick off his1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi (the veracity of this bit of information is heavily disputed by Reagan boosters.) The Boy speculates that the creation of this holiday was an attempt to co-opt Dr. King’s movement, to control and manage and handle the message. On my darker days (of which there are many in this state where the sun never shines in winter) I would tend to agree. Give people a day off in honor of one of America’s most potent and important civil rights leaders and use this holiday to deflect any criticisms of latent and overtly racist policies and practices. And what do we all learn on this day off from work and school? Do people really reflect on what our holidays are about, beyond wading into battles in various culture wars or sporting patriotic colors?

A lot of my friends can’t get excited about activism. They say that big movements about which on can get excited are in the past, and point at things like the civil rights movement, or women’s suffrage. They complain that issues are too complex or too diluted, and that it’s hard to really engage in anything because EVERYTHING needs our attention and our anger. To some extent this is true. On the other hand, people are organizing like never before. There are plenty of focused movements to engage in—they’re just more fragmented into facets, and they’re more local. This weekend I took a tour of Toxic Detroit, sponsored by the hard-working folks at Detroiters Working for Environmental Justice. Their catchphrase is ‘Take a stand for the land in the ‘hood,’ and that pretty much sums it up. We drove through neighborhoods where houses and playgrounds are set against a backdrop of waste incinerators, oil refineries and other impossibly industrial-looking sites, and where residents say their houses tremble on a daily basis from the blasting taking place at the salt mine down the street. One of the poorest neighborhoods in Detroit, which also happens to be largely black and Latino, has the highest rate of child lead-poisoning in the state, thanks to a car-painting plant in the area. Until we in the first world (which refers to only parts of the United States) stop exporting our financial, environmental and social burdens to those inhabiting the lower socioeconomic tiers of the ladder, we have civil rights issues and a need for a civil rights movement.