Last Things

Everyone remembers the Dream.  Everyone remembers the vision of black and white children playing together, and growing up judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.  Everyone remembers Martin Luther King Jr. as a crusader for racial reconciliation and civil rights.  That aspect of his life and work is most likely the reason why my kids have a day off from school today.
However, in the time leading up to his assassination, Martin was actually engaged in work that he had come to see as a broader systemic injustice.  The struggle for racial equality was not over by any stretch of the imagination, but as segregation began to crumble, a deeper problem was uncovered, a problem that has always afflicted humanity, and which is at the core of our most insoluble problems: economic injustice.
King's had begun organizing the Poor People's Campaign at the Southern Christian Leaders Conference, shortly before his murder.  He was in Memphis to support striking sanitation workers.  His focus had shifted in a way that called him to dig deeper into the black heart of an unjust system.
The suspicious and peculiar life of James Earl Ray, the man convicted of King's murder, has now largely become the stuff of conspiracy theories and nonsense, but there is a peculiar reality that rears it's head time and time again in human history.  It was true of Jesus of Nazareth, and it was true of MLK: the world will tolerate you challenging abstract ideas like freedom and equality, it will listen with great intensity to talk of a Kingdom of Heaven or a Dream of a bright future, but if you turn on the money you're going to get yourself got.
People venerate the Dream, they celebrate equality and freedom, but they forget that the night before he was assassinated, King said this:

• "That is where we are today. And also in the human rights revolution, if something isn't done, and in a hurry, to bring the colored peoples of the world out of their long years of poverty, their long years of hurt and neglect, the whole world is doomed."

It is connected to race, no doubt, but it's not just about race.  I'm guessing that not all of the sanitation workers in Memphis were African American.  I know that they were all poor, and I know that they had no power as individuals to effect basic changes in their lives.  But when they organize, when they draw attention and gather support, they can challenge systemic injustice.
As much of a giant as King was, he had learned the lesson well: one voice, no matter how eloquent, cannot speak so well that things change.  Even his masterful I Have a Dream speech was made famous, and powerful, by the thousands of people gathered in Washington DC to hear it.
Since then though the work had become more difficult, the big crowds and wave of sentiment faded away as Martin began to challenge the sinister taint of greed that leaves its residue on so much of human society.
Today, we have made significant progress in the area of racial equality (still not perfect, but with every generation, you can see children growing more color blind).  We have made very little, if any progress, in our struggle for economic justice.  In fact, we may have gone backwards.  Unions have been broken and vilified.  They have, in some cases, been nothing but a symbol of greed and corruption, contributing to the degradation of the workers every bit as much as the old robber barons.  In other cases, they have been rendered impotent by the resistance and/or adaptation of the rich and powerful.
But the need for organization still exists, the need for solidarity still exists, the need to struggle against the injustice and human tragedy that is poverty still exists.  So in honor of the things that Martin was working for in his last days, here are some things I think we ought to be working for in our nation:

1. A living wage, this goes beyond just raising the minimum wage, it encompasses reforming a lot of how we operate as a nation.  A living wage is essentially exactly what it says, a system in which a person performs a function, which is beneficial to society, and is rewarded by having a place to live and food to eat, and beyond that, access to education, healthcare and some opportunity to care for a family and generally enjoy life.
2. Reform the restrictive and increasingly prohibitive costs of higher education.  Again, this is a systemic justice issue.  If you are born into a "comfortable" socio-economic class, you will have no problem accessing the benefits of our educational system. If you are born poor, you will be able to access the system only by great (some would say exceptional) effort.  In a world where a high school education is increasingly not sufficient to pursue a lucrative career, and the financial burdens of a bachelor's or even a technical degree saddle people with almost unmanageable debt, the system is rigged to favor those who are already well off.
3. Reform our criminal justice system.  This is a huge black eye on our nation.  We incarcerate more people by far than any other nation in the world.  To add to the injustice, those incarcerated are disproportionately African American.  This has many factors, but primary among them is the "war on drugs" which has primarily been waged among the urban poor.  Couple this with the fact that money gives those who find themselves on the wrong side of the law, better access to attorneys and legal defense, and you have an epidemic of incarceration.

These are big problems and broad categories, but they are a start at addressing the unjust systems in which we are all involved, and in which we are all complicit. 
Martin said: "Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness."  And he proceeded to use the parable of the Good Samaritan as an example of that dangerous unselfishness.  Can you envision a world where people acted out of "dangerous unselfishness" instead of self interest?
That's a dream indeed, one that needs to come true.