It’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day and I haven’t done a damned thing to promote racial unity or end discrimination.
That’s mostly my own fault, of course, but some of the fault lies with society and how, by deifying our heroes, we so often diminish their message.
First, it’s a safe bet that MLK would not have been okay with a national holiday in his honor. Dr. King was a man with a message but he understood to his marrow that the message he devoted his life to was more important than he ever would be.
King also knew he would not survive, that white hatred would gun him down sooner or later. He expressed this on more than one occasion. To the credit of his great courage, living long was not King’s first priority. Above all, he was committed to leaving an indelible message, the brotherhood of man written in stone.
If we could ask King what to with a holiday honoring his legacy, he’d likely say, “If you need a holiday to understand my life, don’t name it after me. Name it for what it is I’m trying to do here. Call it Brotherhood Day or something.”
King was assassinated before most of the people on the planet today were born. It won’t be long before no living person will have any first-hand memory of the man. Only two things can happen then: His memory can slowly fade into obscurity, or it can elevate MLK to the pantheon of the gods, super-human beings that hover over us and whom we never can match.
Both possibilities are tragedies because they remove us from King, a real, live person, and move us farther from the message of his life.
In the recent box-office smash satire, “Don’t Look Up,” the planet needs saving from an Earth-bound meteor likely to kill everything but the cockroaches. The U.S. president, looking to destroy the asteroid before its arrival, recruits a famous, aging astronaut to blast it apart, on the grounds that, “Washington always needs a hero.”
The truth is, it’s not just Washington that needs a hero. We all do. We are desperate for them. We are superstitious creatures. We crave the comfort of believing in exceptional human beings capable of super-human feats like smashing asteroids, curing cancer, or ending the nation’s racial divides.
It’s the same reason we’re planning a manned mission to Mars when we can learn as much about the place with unmanned missions at a fraction of the price.
The sad irony is that the belief in demi-gods is so very contrary to Dr. King’s message. King was inspired by the messages of Christ and Gandhi, that the plain of justice makes all people equal, that the gods reside not so much above us as within us, that each of us are god-like, waiting to reach our full potential, and that ultimately, love and justice can be achieved not by the speeches and deeds of leaders and heroes but only by actions taken by each of us.
Let’s retire MLK Day. Let’s re-designate Feb. 17 as Brotherhood Day and keep it a national holiday. That wouldn’t diminish the importance of Dr. King’s message. It would drive it home. Dr. King would be proud and we could start in earnest toward fulfilling his dream.
While we’re at it, let’s rename Christianity “Love, Respect and Decency.”
Let’s stop mistaking the message for the man.