Martin Luther King Day Thoughts

For many of us it's an extra day off work or school. For our politicians, it's a chance to score some easy flattering news coverage by uttering the usual noble messages about racism. And for a few of us, Martin Luther King Day is a holiday with meaning.

My own view is that it's a shame we as a nation have missed the chance to make more of this holiday than we do. Somehow we have this notion that race is an issue that affects only black people, gender is for females, sexual orientation for gays and lesbians, ethnicity for Latinos and perhaps Asians, and the list goes on.

But of course, white people do have a race, males have a gender, Christians have a religion, and straight people have a sexual orientation. The culture of the majority may be more visible to the minority, but it's still there, and worth more attention than we usually pay these matters.

Furthermore, as the newly-elected Lieutenant Governor of New York pointed out today, racism is a white problem, just as sexual discrimination is a male problem, and religious discrimination is a Christian problem. When we needlessly marginalize anyone in our society, we miss out on the contributions that person may have made to our community, had he or she been allowed to become a full member.

Nowhere in literature is this lesson more powerfully evoked than in a novel I tend to advocate reading every few months or so, called Three Cities by Sholem Asch. In what is probably the definitive look at the Russian Revolution, Asch describes (through a fictional narrative) how a variety of regimes missed out on a chance to reform the Russian empire into a fair and thriving country for all its citizens because the suggestions of a few smart, capable people who happened to be Jewish were ignored.

For more on the dangers of needlessly marginalizing people for reasons of religion, nationality, or politics, we need look no further than our own present regime's conduct of the war in Iraq. As Jonathan Alter of Newsweek reported on MSNBC, potential candidates for participating in the reconstruction of Iraq were asked, "Do you support Roe vs. Wade?" Why a person's stance on abortion has anything to do with their capability to help rebuild Iraq makes no more sense than why (under this administration) several of our few fluent Arabic speakers in the military were removed from their jobs because they happened to be gay. Nor does it make any sense to disallow companies from countries who did not participate in the invasion of Iraq from participating in the reconstruction, simply by virtue of nationality.

We may never know if our current misadventure in Iraq may have been less of a disaster if our administration had included the best people for the job at each stage of the invasion and reconstruction, rather than the people who seemed most likely to hold views and/or come from backgrounds most similar to the people in the executive branch of our government. What we do know for sure is that the current cast of characters in charge do not seem to have learned any lessons from their mistakes. Then again, have any of us learned any lessons about tolerance from history? What are we doing in our own lives, not just on Martin Luther King Day, but every day, to see people clearly as they are instead of as the preconceived stereotypes we seem to prefer them to be.