I Have a Dream

The kids have a snow day today, a two hour early dismissal tomorrow, and the next two Mondays off, so much for any sort of regular schedule this month.  I told them that they had Monday off for Martin Luther King Jr. day, and she said, "I love that guy!"  And it wasn't just because she gets next Monday off either.  The man has been practically canonized by America.  And mostly, he deserved the laud and honor that he gets, but I wonder if Martin would have been really comfortable with it.
Sometimes I think we make him our civil rights mascot and use our collective love and admiration of him as a mask for some of the flaws in our character that remain not so carefully hidden.  He's a super hero, and because of his assassination, a martyr.  And often you lose the ability to clearly see the man behind a martyrdom, we even do it with Jesus, why would MLK (or JFK or RFK for that matter) be any different.
He was a man who had a dream, a vision actually, and it was a good one, but his dream was not without detractors.  Some, most famously Malcolm X, thought that King's insistence on non-violence was holding back the change that needed to happen "by any means necessary."  And we love us some non-violence, but we sometimes confuse non-violence for patience and inaction.  King went to jail for his activity, and was vilified by defenders of the status quo.  In other words, he did stuff, some of it unpopular, some of it not extreme enough in the eyes of many, but he did something.
In an arena (civil rights) where there is a lot of talk, and generally not much action, sometimes any action can seem like a quantum leap.  We love heroes in this country, but we also love to chop them off at the knees.  In an ironic twist, James Earl Ray may have done the greatest service to King's legacy by killing him.  At the height of his prophetic voice, before compromises or human failings could really lay him low, a bullet actually made him immortal.
Every once in a while the voice of hater pops up and mentions that he may not have been as perfect as he seemed, but they cannot really touch him, not really.  Now what we think of when we think of MLK is that voice echoing out from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, now what we think of is a letter from Birmingham Jail, his is a face forever set before our children as the face of justice and equality.
That's all good and fine.  But actual justice and equality have eluded us for far too long.  The fact that King is still the primary person people think of when you talk about Civil Rights (followed probably by Abraham Lincoln, which is even more depressing).  It means that since 1968, no one has stepped up and taken the reigns of the movement, and it's left to people of dubious reputation like Al Sharpton.  People like Jesse Jackson, who stepped out for a minute into the bright lights of King's Legacy, get pretty much beat down and ridiculed.  In the long run it seems that no one is fit to wear the hero's robes.
Because this is not a problem to be solved by a super hero, it's a problem to be solved by ordinary people who have the courage to stand up and say, "I have a dream."  We need to stop waiting for someone to rise up and become the cult of personality that we think we want, and simply get busy and changing our own hearts and minds with regard to racial justice and human dignity.
And we should not allow ourselves the illusion that MLK was the end of the struggle.  He acknowledged in his prescient, "I have seen the promised land," speech that he was not going to "get there." (delivered in Memphis, April 3, 1968, King was shot April 4, 1968)  He compared himself to Moses, who could lead the people to the brink and point the way to justice and equality, but was not going to get to walk across the Jordan.
There has been no Joshua.
And even though we celebrate him with a day off, we're a long way from honoring his legacy.