I never have cared much about Martin Luther King Day. All the other holidays we have are for events for presidents. What did Martin Luther King do? He gave a great speech, but that did not seem like much — hardly worth having his own holiday. Nonetheless, since I could not change it, I just accepted it. My employer does not give me the day off anyway.
With age I have decided there is a certain appropriateness Martin Luther King Day. Perhaps we need a holiday for a man who sole claim to greatness is that he was an ordinary man who risked it all for freedom, even to the point of defying the authorities in his own country.
Dr. King’s most notable work is his “I Have a Dream” speech, and on his holiday, I think it is worth taking a moment to read it. Please do.
As was perhaps then appropriate, King began with his speech a reference to the Emancipation Proclamation. King’s battle had as its focus the civil rights of Blacks, a mission left unfinished by our greatest war. Yet, Dr. King’s battle is also worth seeing as part of the larger ongoing struggle for human freedom.
In the land we now call United States, the struggle for the American ideals of freedom began when colonists started arriving from Europe. Many of the early colonials came here in a quest for the freedom to practice their own religious beliefs. Later generations, when King George III sought to restrain their rights, defined and forged these ideals in battle during the Revolutionary War. Yet even then, they left the job incomplete.
The struggle for freedom in this nation reached its climax during the American Civil War, a struggle started by ordinary men. Prior to the war, ordinary people, much like Dr. King, struggled to address the issue of slavery. They wrote books such Uncle Tom’s Cabin, helped slaves escape to Canada, and they campaigned for abolitionist politicians.
The South, favoring slavery, sought to protect slavery by spreading it to the rest of the nation. They succeeded to the extent the Supreme Court took their side. The North, favoring slavery’s abolition, sought to elect abolitionists such as Abraham Lincoln. With election of Abraham Lincoln, the clash became irreconcilable. Thus began the Civil War.
Many years have past since that war left much of our nation scarred and burnt. To some extent, we can appreciate the depth of that struggle from grainy old pictures, museums relics, and the stories that have been handed down to us. We can also see the byproducts of the hatreds that still remain, the hatreds that King fought. Yet we have struggles in our own time that can tell us more about the struggle to be free.
In land that seems far away, people are fighting for the right to be free. In fact, soldiers of the United States daily take up their arms and hunt so-called insurgents. “Insurgents” — such a mild, almost heroic term. When junior Republican senators and congressmen break ranks with the Republican leadership, our news media likes to use the same term. Yet the insurgents in Iraq rejoice in murder, and their goal is a totalitarian theocracy.
Like Americans before the Civil War, we too must realize we have a choice. Just as the slaveholders of the South sought to protect the “peculiar institution” of slavery by spreading to other states, so too will the “insurgents” in Iraq seek to protect their “peculiar institutions.” If we freedom in our own land, we must fight for freedom in other lands. If we want freedom for ourselves, we must be prepared to fight for the freedom of other men. We have no other choice.
