I think the Tuesdays following a three day weekend are harder than just coming into work on Monday. There’s part of you that still wants to play. I had a very nice MLK weekend in Boston with David, primarily spent watching football, touring the art museum, and eating foods that were altogether unhealthy for us (I’m convinced that I gained at least 3 pounds over the course of the weekend). But that special slice of birthday cheesecake at Mike’s Pastry Shop on the North End was definitely worth the extra 3 pounds. I would highly recommend it, even though the people behind the counter are kind of cranky.

Yesterday we celebrated the birthday of slain civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I read an article once, on a previous MLK day, talking about the problems of holding a national holiday to commemorate King’s memory. While on the one hand it enshrines King and the civil rights movement into our collective national memory, on the other hand it can sanitize and water-down King’s message.

For example, as children celebrating MLK day in school, we learn that Martin Luther King, Jr. had a dream that everyone in this country can be equal. It is a dream, we are taught, closely aligned with the American dream stated by our nation’s founders two centuries earlier. People worked very hard and endured great suffering so that this dream might be achieved. We remember and honor their work during this holiday.

The problem with this, in mainstream America anyway, is that we are tempted to think that the struggle against racism is finished—why else would we have a national holiday to commemorate it? We also can fall prey to forgetting the more challenging aspects of King’s message. Shortly before his death, for instance, King had become a rather pointed critic of the Vietnam War and larger issues of global poverty.

Take this for example, from a sermon King delivered in 1967 in New York City about Vietnam:

“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 [applause], we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

What was amazing to me in reading this sermon was its expansive vision. In it, King talks about the destruction that violence causes, whether perpetrated by gangs on the street or by a government. He talks about the rampant materialism of our society, and how our excesses have left so many others in extreme want. He’s talking about the same issues we are talking about today, but he’s taking it on nearly 40 years before our own present circumstances.

King’s vision, you see, extended far beyond race relations between black and white in the United States. King really was talking about a new world, one rooted solidly in what God calls us to be and what God wills for humanity. This isn’t something you’ll necessarily get from reading your second grade textbook.

So I’ll leave you today with a few more words from Dr. King, in 1967, about who we can be and what God still calls us to be.

“We must not engage in a negative anticommunism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy [applause], realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity, and injustice, which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.

…Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores, and thereby speed the day when ‘every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low [Audience:] (Yes); the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain.’”

Kelsey