In this time that we set aside to honor one of our — if not the greatest American — let us pause from our struggle for a more perfect union to take an inventory of justice in America. We need to make sure our course is set toward change — fundamental change.
Dr. King lived and died for African-American people, for people of color, and, yes, for white people — all people. He knew what union organizer Gene Debs knew in 1917 — “While there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
Dr. King knew what The Carpenter from Nazareth knew 2000 years ago, “Whatsoever ye do unto the least of these, ye do also unto me.” And so Dr. King knew and said that we are all bound together. Most of all, Dr. King lived and died for the poor, the vulnerable to restore God given human dignity.
Today our economy does not work for the majority of Americans stuck in stagnant and declining income, the middle class is threatened, more and more people are unemployed while an evil, right-wing intransigent Republican Congress cuts off unemployment insurance.
The water of our fellow Americans in West Virginia has been poisoned by a sick economic system that is little more than a sophisticated law of the jungle.
In Pennsylvania the radical right-wing, fantastically wealthy Koch boys bribe and extort the state legislature to destroy the unions of public employees. The same forces allow a rapacious energy industry to drill 4000 feet into the earth that God called us to be stewards of, and they blow up our own planet from within. They poison our water and our people in a process called fracking.
Workers in America are routinely deprived of their First Amendment rights to free speech and free association when they try to form a union to reclaim our piece of the economy.
The number of fellow Americans incarcerated has accelerated by 800 times in the last 35 years. We imprison more of our own people than any other nation.
And the richest and most powerful amongst us seek only to exploit and oppress the rest of us for more and more for themselves.
Immigrants today wanting only to live, work, be paid for their labor, and be accorded the God given dignity and respect they were born with are treated as beasts of burden, treated as if they have no soul, treated as if they were not born in the image of an Almighty and All-Loving God, breathed to life with the spark of the Divine.
Who is the real Dr. King? Were he here right now, he would not just complain about this sad inventory. He would call us into the streets in nonviolent direct action to build what he called a creative tension to right these wrongs. Dr. King would inspire us to, “Let America be America again, The land that never has been yet— And yet must be—the land where every man is free.” -Langston Hughes
Photo source: SchuminWeb on Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)