What We Owe Dr. King
It is so tempting on this day to despair.
Martin Luther King Jr. would have been 93 years old this week. But he was shot and killed by a racist with a rifle in Memphis, TN.
It is tempting to say that the modern Republican party hasn’t moved much beyond the racists who thought King was a communist bent on destroying America. The FBI bugged him, harassed him, threatened his life. My own political hero, Robert Kennedy, approved the wiretap. Instead of protecting King and his colleagues from the hate that boiled within the ranks of white America, the FBI fanned it. Its agents infiltrated the civil rights movement and weakened it.
On King’s birthday, we, white Americans, are all suddenly for civil rights. We don’t see color. We have black friends. We decry discrimination of all kinds. But so much of that is fake and wrong. We all see color. We have gone to great lengths to make sure we don’t have black friends.
We, white Americans, have fixed the banking system to make it easier for us to get a mortgage. We have fixed the school system so only our schools get better. We created charter schools, religious schools and all manner of other vehicles to ensure our kids have it better.
We have ensured a system of generational wealth that is passed to our children by favorable tax laws.
We have created an entire language and practice of racism to benefit ourselves.
Almost half our political leadership still endorse a coup by denying the results of the national election and remaining silent about the riot to invalidate that election.
Why? Because we labor and live under the false notion that we, white Americans, created this country in some image of a God. That America is a Christian nation, where everyone works hard and values their neighbor.
But that is not the truth. The truth is that we stole this country. We stole it from the native people who were here first. Then we forced black people into slave ships to do the work we didn’t want to do. Together with the work of immigrants from Ireland, Italy and China, we built the railroad and a transportation system and an economy that powered the greatest creation of wealth in human history.
And we claimed that success as our own. And we rigged a political system to benefit ourselves for the long-term. We set a tax rate on generational wealth investment at 20%. We allowed corporations to avoid paying corporate income tax by hiding their wealth in other countries, which to this day starves the rest of the country of billions in revenue.
We created a political system where U.S. Senators won’t vote for family leave or child tax credits because it is too expensive but they will vote for a defense spending bill to manufacture far more expensive aircraft carriers and fighter jets.
We have created a political system where half the U.S. Senate, mostly old white men, won’t vote for a bill to protect the right to vote.
And yet, on Dr. King’s birthday….
The Number 1 book on the best-seller list is the 1619 Project, an examination of slavery and our unfulfilled responsibility to account for what we did. The book’s author, Nikole Hannah- Jones, will not be silenced by those seeking to sideline her message.
In Richmond, VT, Alison Kasakowski Conant is running for the local school board while raising her family on a dairy farm.
Three women are running for a U.S. House seat in VT, which means, for the first time, that spot will be held by a woman.
In Nosara, Costa Rica, sea turtles are protected and large swaths of land are set aside for ecological diversity and climate resiliency. Health care, including COVID tests, is easily available.
And in Point Reyes CA, the Cowgirl Creamery makes cheese from milk made on farms practicing regenerative farming while the Tesla people from San Francisco line up at the door.
On this MLK birthday…
Point Reyes is an hour north of San Francisco, a real-life symbol of what government and people can do together. It is a place of spectacular beauty, of birds, waves, hiking, oysters, beaches, forests and agriculture.
Back in the 60s, as you would expect, businessmen wanted to develop this place for profit. But a group of women stepped in to protect it. They led a campaign that ended up on the desk of President Kennedy, who then, in 1962, signed the bill to buy this peninsula and protect its 53,000 acres from development.
The price: $13 million. About the cost of housing one prisoner in Guantanamo Bay.
But even the success story of Pt. Reyes comes with the usual racism and exploitation. This area supported the Miwok native people, who fished and flourished here. When the explorer Francis Drake arrived, he brought Spanish missionaries, disease and religion and the Miwok lost everything. Even in America’s most beautiful places, racism and conquest lie at the root of everything.
On the ground here, activists work to remove Drake’s name from the main road in town and the Miwoks are now a federally recognized tribe.
And the work continues.
Just before his death, Dr. King expanded his vision to confront poverty and the war in Vietnam. He was much criticized for it. But he said that to do nothing, to confine his movement to voting rights and not take on the other ills in society, would be wrong and lead us all to despair.
It is easy to despair.
But on King’s birthday, we owe it to him - and ourselves - to do better. To not confine our votes to self interest but to take on the other ills of society. That is the way he lived and that is what he left to us: the unfinished business of building a better world.
