Happy MLK Day

So, I went over to the post office earlier today. It was maybe ten minutes past nine, but the lobby door was locked. What kind of BS is this, I thought. I went to the side entrance and tried every door, with each new one I pulled harder and with more frustration. Finally one opened. I moseyed through the deserted lobby to the self service kiosk, just looking around.

What the hell...oh...oh yeah...

Yeah...duh...

So the stuff I'm mailing will be chilling in the box until tomorrow anyway.

But today, Martin Luther King Jr. Day and poetically Inauguration Day, we take a chance to look back over the body of work of our most famous Civil Rights leader.

We do this knowing that his name was originally Michael King Jr, and his friends all called him Mike. And while we study the course of the black American from the late 1950s to the present, the talk in the mainstream media will gloss over the fact that Dr. King had begun to brainstorm tackling broad social change on top of bringing attention to Civil Rights. This type of stance might have ultimately led to a similar end for the Reverend, but may not have included James Earl Ray.

The debate of those bygone days was whether violence or non-violence was the proper way to force the changes in society that the Civil Rights movement demanded (and that we haven't entirely achieved, Obama's election and re-election notwithstanding), but we won't hear any of that today. We also won't hear about Stokely Carmichael, the radical counterpoint to Dr. King who disagreed with the Reverend's stance on non-violence.

Dr. King was an icon, hero, and martyr, but by celebrating him and him alone, we lose an essential part of our collective American identity: the desire to fight back against tyranny.