Thanks to Martin Luther King, Jr., I get to go rowing two hours later today. The
sun will even be up for most of practice. I got to sleep until a time when I would
normally be off the water.
Despite all this, though, that's not the
main thing for which I am grateful to Reverend King. I have a personal pantheon of
"saints", people who have spent their lives trying to do good in the world and who
actually have succeeded. (It's that second condition that makes the list so
small.)
Pete Seeger is on the list -- a man who's spent his life
singing about social justice, marching for justice, working for justice and a
cleaner planet. Pete doesn't hedge about his real goal: "If music could only save
the world, then I'd only be a musician." He's getting old and feeble and I don't
think he'll manage to save the world before he dies, but he leaves a large group
of people who have been touched or had their lives change by his message, a Hudson
River much cleaner than he found it, and better race relations around the world.
(Of course, we've now more or less switched to fighting over ethnicity instead of
race. I said he was a saint, not a Messiah.)
Jimmy Carter is on the
list. I believe it was worth living through his presidency in order to have his
time as ex-President -- the Carter Center, Habitat for Humanity, the trips as
peace mediator to the Middle East (where they're still fighting but at least now
sometimes they're talking). Even more unusual, Carter provides an example of a man
who lives by his creed. I don't believe in his creed, but that's not the point.
I think John Henry Faulk, proponent of the First Amendment (yes, he
was also in Hee-Haw) would be in the pantheon if I knew more about him. Much as I
admire Ben Franklin, I don't see him in the same light, possibly because I just
tend to think There Were Giants in That Time. Or John Muir -- most of his great
accomplishments stemmed from living the life he enjoyed.
Anyway,
Martin Luther King has a firm place in the pantheon, and serves as proof that
history can be changed by individuals. There is no doubt that the civil
rights movement would have been born without him; it had already started before he
got involved. But would it have gone as long without violence as it did? I doubt
it. Would it have shown such an example of peaceful organization as the Bus
Boycott without his charisma? I doubt it. Without King, it might have taken longer
for a critical mass of people of all races to realize how wrong the situation in
the South was. I know we still have far to go. The US is far from an ideal society
even yet. But now prejudice is seen by almost everyone as a shameful thing; even
people showing it have to reach for some other explanation. The question that is
debated is not whether all people deserve equal access to law, education,
opportunity, but how to get it to them. How to achieve fairness for all. And
that's a huge step,, and Dr. King was a huge part of it. His speeches were not
only eloquent but prescient -- the one before his death was chilling.
Go celebrate his day by reading
what he had to say.