To honor MLK, Jr. (belatedly)

I have developed an unfortunate habit of reading several books concurrently. Unfortunate because, inter alia, yesterday I wanted to quote a Martin Luther King, Jr. observation but it wasn't in the book I had thought the source and I couldn't remember where else seemed probable. This morning the answer appeared the instant I opened Diane Durston's Wabi Sabi The Art of Everyday Life, a frequent part of my morning meditations. Since we near the end of the week in which we celebrate MLK's life and achievements, the quote provides a timely example of why we celebrate his genius.

We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

As this posting is written, the President of the United States is being tried in the U.S. Senate after being impeached in the House for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. Environmental rules and regulations that have been honored for decades are being diminished or dismissed by the current regime (a mode or system of rule or government: a dictatorial regime.). Those rules and regulations are intended to protect the public's health and public lands held in trust for all Americans. Increasingly xenophobic and inhumane tactics are being implemented, including separating asylum-seeking families and caging children. Democratic standards are being violated, and the United States Senate appears to be ready to put political party and power before country, decency, and democracy.

we've restored democracy's endangered symbol,
can we do likewise for democracy itself?

Photo by J. Harrington

Were he alive today, I suspect MLK would be helping to organize yet another march on Washington. We can best honor him, I believe, by turning out in unprecedented numbers this election year and voting out those who have blatantly dishonored the ideals on which our democracy was founded and which MLK challenged us as a society to live up to. Just because we find it difficult and inconvenient to consistently live up to those ideals is far from a sufficient reason to discard them and dishonor all that MLK stood and fought for.

The Second Coming

By William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

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