The Friend We Need but Do Not Want: Martin Luther King Jr. On the inconvenience of Martin Luther King Jr.
Appears in Winter
2017 Issue: Ancient Friendships
December 1st, 2017
It may be the temptation
of every age to see one's own time as uniquely haunted by the ghosts of the
past or as disproportionately responsible for the shape of the future. It is a
predictable form of generational vanity, I suppose. But even so, one could be
forgiven for seeing our present days in just this way. I mean, honestly.
Almost everywhere one
looks, indeed even if one tries not to look, life in the West seems to
have fused its historic dysfunctions into something new; into a dark carnival
of open racial hatred, unabated economic inequality, and cartoonish political
theatre—each made more menacing by the very real threat of annihilating
violence. Yes, one could be forgiven.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
was slowly transformed from a courageous man with an extraordinary vision of
democracy into little more than a highly quotable civic abstraction,; a figure
that many revere, but that few really listen to.
And yet in the midst of
the unfamiliar strangeness of these days, one could also be consoled by the
re‐emergence of a familiar presence: that of Martin Luther King Jr. Almost
everywhere one looks—again, even if one tries not to look—we see him:
His face modelled on our murals, his words printed for our protests, his voice
sampled in our songs. Donald Trump even has a bust of King in his office.
Consider that for a moment . . .
Read more at https://www.cardus.ca/comment/article/5158/the-friend-we-need-but-do-not-want-martin-luther-king-jr/?platform=hootsuite
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