So I've done three of these previously. I thought the first two were pretty good. The third, not so much. I honestly haven't looked at it, nor do I plan to. I may not think it's that bad, I may think it's even worse than I originally thought. My comparatively negative opinion of that third piece is what gives me the inspiration to (hopefully) make this fourth edition better.
(Ed. note: I looked at last year's edition. It wasn't that bad.)
As most of us know, Dr. King's vision was to make this country - and to an extent, the world - a better place. His vision was...correction, is: it's still alive, even though he may not be in a physical form...to make this country - its leaders, its citizens, its rich, its poor, its white, its nonwhite, its total composition - live up to the ideals that a bunch of men on the east coast wrote about almost two centuries earlier.
"Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men."
People often define the color white as pure and pristine: how ironic that a black man was one of the main catalysts for the "whitening" of America, in that context. Among other things, the period of history which encompasses slavery and systematic segregation is a stain: an impurity that clouds so much of the nation's aura. America's purity, its clarity...both are still greatly diminished by the fact that its originators made the conscientious decision to not live up to the mores that they instituted.
"Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness."
King almost literally dragged these dead men from their graves - yes, them: even though the physical forms of Washington and Jefferson and their ilk were long placed in their final resting places, their actions and their spiritual forms were still present for King to grab - and take them toward the light. King almost literally dragged their antecedents through the morass of their own immorality and forced them to take the trip with him toward the light. Those weren't the only people he dragged, though.
"Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable...every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals."
I've always wondered about the willingness of "regular" black people to participate in the movement back then. I wonder about that willingness to participate now even more, but that's another matter. Everyone wanted freedom and equality, but how many people were actually willing to do whatever it took to actually gain those things? We know the price that King paid, the price that Medgar Evers paid. We know that others paid similarly, even though their roles were much different. What we don't...well, what I don't know is how many people were willing to go that far: how many people were willing to share in that burden, and the extent to which they were willing to share.
"A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan."
If we come from the people who stood by and freeloaded their way to equality, then our current lack of action makes a lot of sense. Everyone knows we have a long way to go. Here's the thing: you'd think it would be much easier to travel this road due to the access points we have reached. Those access points also serve as speed bumps. "We've got it good"...and that's true. However, looking at it from the other side; it likely considers the status quo a Pareto optimal solution (think politically for a minute). Stated most simply and succinctly, a Pareto optimal solution is one in which no one side can improve its position without affecting that of the other side. Everything becomes zero-sum once you move off a point of Pareto optimality.
"So what's wrong with Pareto optimality"...well, the concept of Pareto optimality assumes two things that are absent in today's America: perfect information and complete markets. Dr. King tried his best to give America the former to foster the creation of the latter. Dr. King's dream is for America to achieve its own Pareto optimality, its own functional optimality.
For America to achieve optimality of any kind, its people - note, I did not say citizens: as much as some would like to totally discard non-citizens, their path is our path - have to find their own optimality. As much as Dr. King did, he would tell us that this 2013 America is not the promised land that he spoke of. I'm pretty sure he'd tell us that it's going to take more of a widespread effort to get there. How? Well, there's one thing that never hurts.
"The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education."
No comments:
Post a Comment