Taking a stroll during a late-winter sunny day with my wife and 6 month old son this past weekend I came across a stiff poster tacked to a pine stick and jammed into a rock-wall garden sprouting purple crocuses and soft green tulip shoots. The placard's gleaming white background held - in bold, black contrast - an image of Martin Luther King Jr.
"Speak truth to power" framed the civil rights leader's picture in stoplight red lettering.
Now, I've seen the sign and heard the slogan before, but spotting it proudly displayed in an early spring garden out in front of someone's neatly kept house gave me pause. I wondered why, throughout the year, we don't see more prominent and powerful reminders of the gutsy, life-risking pioneers that fought to abolish our society's government-sanctioned mechanisms of oppression. More than that, I asked myself whether or not it has become acceptable to only think hard about our bloody past and our uncertain future on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and during Black History Month.
Granting the civil rights movement and the centuries long sacrifices forced on African Americans a holiday is both important and honorable. However, the inevitable stagnant routines that accompany American holidays threatens to flush the adrenaline-packed revolutionary spirit right out of these celebrations of radical change and struggle: wave a poster, march a little bit on one day, and forget about the painful histories and revolutionary ideas until the same time next year.
Our collectively short attention spans are groomed by sound bite driven advertising, entertainment, news, and political organizations: no surprise in a society where time is thought of as money. According to this notion, it's imperative to make a quick sales pitch so folks will hurry and buy the products, movies, top stories, and laws hawked by the rich and powerful among us.
When you bring these two elements together - making revolution an annual holiday exercise and tapping into the time-stressed, short attention span of the typical American - the strong correlations between the struggles of the past and those of the present become downplayed, muddied, and even lost. The resulting mass mentality of mediocrity makes fresh revolution against new oppressive situations at the local, national, and international levels tough to conceive and hard to pull off.
Remember, King was a radical leader facing a violent opposition that didn't want to see the way business was done in America change. An early example of his fighting spirit occurred in 1955 when King supported Rosa Parks' famous act of civil disobedience on a Montgomery, Alabama bus by helping to organize boycotts of the city's public transportation system. While support for his actions eventually spread throughout America and the world, King's life, and the lives of his family, were threatened at the time with a shotgun blast through his front door and the bombing of his home. Tough conditions to operate under, but he made the time to persist in the fight for justice until Alabama was forced by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1956 to desegregate their bus system.
Defeating the violent, in-your-face racial segregation in the South was a courageous and necessary change. However, the oppressive elements of our current culture have morphed, and now, more than ever, they transcend race and infect crucial issues such as voting accuracy and environmental sustainability.
King proved that making the time to become aware of, and then actively fighting against, the cultural architects that degrade everyone's quality of life is a full time gig. Seeking justice is the kind of work that persists beyond a part-time celebration confined to one day in January and the shortest month of the year.
King's unflagging struggle to influence his community in positive, loving ways 50 years ago serves as a blueprint for the struggles Seattleites, and Americans as a whole, face today. With Martin Luther King Jr. Day over more than a month ago, and as the celebratory and somber tone of Black History Month fades into the glory of spring, take care not to tune out your sensitivity toward oppression as the year matures. It never feels good to get blindsided by something you should have seen coming.
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