Many things have been said about this man. I have had people tell me that King was really a Communist or that if he were alive today he would be a Democrat despite the fact that on numerous times, in his own words, Rev. King denounced Communism as morally relativistic and incompatible with Christianity and blamed both the Republican and Democratic parties for the lack of progress in the area of social justice.
The point of such claims is clearly an attempt to gain a moral high ground from which to defend an ideology, governmental system, or political group. But I fear that we do a great disservice to the message when we alter the messenger to match our agenda.
I cannot honestly say that I can guess what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would be doing if he were alive today. I cannot definitively say what specific causes he would be fighting for or which groups he would be joining or opposing, but I can tell you is in which direction the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. leads me.
Dr. King wrote and spoke often about the need not only for the legal right to equality but also the actual availability of the means to attain equality. In King's own words:
"What will it profit him to be able to send his children to an integrated school if the family income is insufficient to buy them school clothes? What will he gain by being permitted to move into an integrated neighborhood if he cannot afford to do so because he is unemployed or has a low-paying job with no future?When I read words like those above I am saddened to see how little progress we have made since the time of Dr. King.
I look around the neighborhood in which I live and ask myself, "Is anyone really free?"
We have had the Emancipation Proclamation, the Civil Rights Movement, Affirmative Action, and various legislation aimed at ending oppression; yet, I fear that much of what we have done to balance the field has only created a landslide in another direction.
No longer do we have men and women bought and sold, viewed as property, and treated as livestock. No, we are beyond that. We are civilized now, and instead of judging a person on the color of their skin we distill their life down to a number and rank by which to judge them. But we forget what is the true root of slavery.
In my opinion we have traded one slavery for another.
At its origin, slavery was nothing more than an exchange of servitude for debt. The most common form of slavery was an agreement between a debtor that could no longer repay his debt and a creditor who would not or could not forgive the debt. It was an agreement between one man and another for a period of time to repay a debt.
During this time, the debtor would likely move onto the estate of the creditor and would be provided with shelter, clothing, and food. If the term of service was especially long, often the creditor would provide beyond the basic essentials in an attempt to make life more comfortable for the debtor.
Sometimes, at the end of the term of servitude, the debtor would decide that the comfortable life he had come to have as a slave was better than the life he would go back to; and thus would ask to stay on and be joined to the creditor's household.
The problem with slavery was that, as time passed, the practice became institutionalized. And rather than remaining a private agreement between two people, slavery became a method of exchanging the payment of servitude from one person to another. Once this change happened the debtor became a commodity, property to be bought and sold.
Now let me compare that to our present situation.
At the inception of many of our country's social help programs there was a desire to right a wrong, to reconcile a moral obligation. It was good that our country recognized that a moral debt was owed.
It was decided that the answer to repaying this moral debt was to make a financial payment; but money is not appropriate tender for the payment of moral obligation. The only possible outcome was that the moral debt went unpaid while a financial debt was created.
Our nation was like the bleeding heart banker who, in an attempt to right a moral injustice, approves the loaning of money to the injured party. The bank can go bankrupt itself and never repay the moral debt, and only serves to lay the weight of a financial debt to the shoulders already injured by the moral injustice.
We created a system of handouts, a system that encourages the recipients to exert only the minimum amount of effort and activity necessary to survive. There was no vehicle for upward movement built into the system. In an effort to quickly offer a "leg up" there was no thought of making sure there was a saddle waiting at the top; and so many simply fell back into the mud, worse off than before.
I believe strongly in the adage, "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." And what I see happening is a lot of fish being handed out instead of fishing poles.
The result is a new method of exchange of servitude for debt. At the beginning, the government provided only for the basic essentials of shelter, clothing, and food. But as the term of service has lengthened, the government saw it fit to provide beyond the basic essentials in order that the debtor could live a comfortable life.
What we have created is whole levels of society so dependent on government provision that they are willing to vote anyone into office that will promise to continue or grow these provisions regardless of the freedom and liberty they must give up in exchange. Upon comparing the life they have come to enjoy at the hands of the government with the one they would have to create with the sweat of their brow they choose to join themselves to Uncle Sam's household rather than fight to create their own house.
What our nation really needs is to wake up to the ineffectiveness of our current course. The cure for our worsening condition is nor more of the same old medicine. We need to reform the way our government provides for those in need of help.
We need to find ways to "teach a man to fish" rather than simply handing out more fish.
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