The Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday serves as an annual reminder of two of this country’s highest ideals — serving others and the creation of an equitable society. This year, amid the economic turmoil of our country and the suffering of our brothers and sisters in Haiti, the lessons from Dr. King’s life and the message of this holiday provided timely reminders to each of us individually and to society as a whole.
“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom,” King said in 1967.
I include this quote not only as a protest against our continued escalation in military spending nationally, but also to bring this closer to home. I had the opportunity to visit a local middle school last week and saw an environment that echoes more of militarism than of social uplift. Bathrooms locked, lockers taken away, field trips cancelled and as the youth told me, “All because of the crime here.” This punitive environment is the best we can do to serve and empower our next generation of leaders?
And how many other elements of our society can we think of that fit with this theme — more resources poured into punishment and enforcement than in the social services that could prevent the former from being needed. We criminalize addictions, and instead of treating the addicts, we incarcerate them. We continue to see the hospitals in our city chase thousands of citizens into bankruptcy each year instead of creating a system that doesn’t punish people for getting sick.
When I think of the service to our community needed to dismantle such systems, it is something much more than soup kitchen service measured in volunteer hours. Using this analogy, what we need is to find out why people are hungry and why certain groups are disproportionately left without food, rather than simply serving up a hot meal. It requires service that makes us thermometers, not merely thermostats — we must be willing to change the temperature ourselves, facing the opwposition and resistance that status quo and its cadre will bring.
Dr. King is also quoted to have said, “History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people but the appalling silence of the good people.”
Yes, some things have changed since the Civil Rights movement. For instance, more wealth has risen from the hands of the masses into the hands of a few, making America less economically equitable than it was in the era of Jim Crow laws and segregated lunch counters. Educational status, health inequities and poverty rates persist disproportionately in the same populations afflicted half a century ago. And while women and minorities have made some strides toward fair wages (when compared to males and whites, respectively), much evidence would suggest stagnation of progress in this realm as well.
The equitable society that King and other social prophets championed comes down to a simple, troubling question: Do we value all citizens, all humans, as equal?
At times, it seems that we are satisfied by simply agreeing that all humans should be treated as equal as opposed to working, crying, sweating, teaching and protesting until this becomes a reality. The extensive inequities in America that distinguish us from the rest of the industrialized world clearly show, regardless of the flowery language used (e.g. “land of opportunity”), that we do not value all lives equally. If we do, we sure have a strange way of showing it in our society.
We must begin to cure the epidemic of individualism in our country if we are to make true strides toward a more equitable society, replacing individual wealth/power/prestige/degrees with an emphasis on systems that promote success collectively. And we must be able to do this without immediately jumping into divisive political debates (our current default), and we should advance the discourse to a more unified focus on change toward equity.
As you enjoy Black History month, do take a day to consider how to strengthen your service and how to more effectively work for equality. Then comes the harder part — to live that change you want to see.
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