Justice

Today is a national holiday, a day that honors the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. It should be a national day for celebrating the life of a great American visionary, yet I find myself feeling annoyed and disappointed. King's special day is not American, it is African-American.

I turn on the TV and see groups of African-Americans celebrating their inspirational leader, not groups of Americans celebrating an inspirational life. I look in the newspapers and find events that center around African-American speakers and preachers who talk about Dr. King's role in the Civil Rights movement, not the relevance of his message to all people today.

I hear one group claiming ownership of a universal idea because that idea emerged from their group. And I am annoyed and disappointed because that idea about which King spoke so passionately and eloquently--the idea of justice for all people--belongs to everyone and to identify it with one group or one movement or one point in history is to diminish the power of its truth.

On this day, I want to see white faces and black faces and Asian faces and American Indian faces and Latino faces and biracial faces at celebrations of justice. I want to hear people talking about the relevance of King's words to the contemporary world situation. I want his words and actions to be honored as the words and actions of one who sought to embody a universal value.

King himself balked at his being identified exclusively with the Civil Rights movement. In a speech entitled Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence, he said:

Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: "Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King?" "Why are you joining the voices of dissent?" "Peace and civil rights don't mix," they say. "Aren't you hurting the cause of your people," they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.

So I suggest that, on this day, we could be talking about Abu Ghraib and terrorism and the death penalty and public education. We could be listening to the words of a visionary and hearing him say to our own time:

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.

This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls "enemy," for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin...we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.

I believe that only when we listen to King's powerful voice as the voice of an American prophet speaking to the world--not an African-American civil rights leader speaking to an oppressed minority--will we do him the justice he deserves.

Posted by Elissa Bishop-Becker at January 17, 2005 12:39 PM | TrackBack