A Visit To The Past

"Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man's sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true." ~ Martin Luther King Jr.

Lone Ranger has posted a link to a poem about Martin Luther King today, whose author has pointed out the negative changes in the black culture since MLK's death in 1968.

Two years ago, I wrote a letter to the editor of my local paper. It was in response to an article about Martin Luther King and what he accomplished. It was the authors contention that MLK didn't accomplish very much, that there had been little positive change. I then copied and pasted the letter into a MLK day post here on my blog. The paper published my letter in it's entirety. The following, self edited, is what I wrote on my blog:

The local newspaper here had an article written by a David A Love, a writer for Progressive Media Project in Madison, Wisconsin, as a guest columnist. In it, Mr. Love made some pretty astounding statements.

He said since Dr. King died, "Americans have learned few lessons from King". His first example was, "37 million people live below the poverty line including 13 million children."

I had it in my mind that perhaps the percentage of those living below the poverty line might have been higher than that at the time of Dr. King's death, but I couldn't find much information specifically addressing that issue. So, I didn't reply, but I wonder what that has to do with racial equality.

Black and poor are two words that are not synonymous.

Next, he said, "45 million of us don't have health insurance", But I think there are too many factors influencing that to draw the conclusion that Americans haven't learned to accept everyone as equals from that. Some people choose not to have health insurance, and anyway, that isn't the governments responsibility. I decided not to address that statement in my reply, as my letter was already getting longer than I intended.

With that in mind, this is the letter that I sent to the editor of the Hagerstown Herald Mail, addressing the rest of the statements he made:

To the Editor:

According to your guest columnist, David A. Love, in the article entitled, America Should Honor King's Teachings, (Herald Mail Monday Jan. 16) "Americans have learned few lessons" since the death of Martin Luther King Jr.

Mr. Love arrogantly assumes the readers will blindly accept whatever he says as fact, without questioning or doing research. That is a mistake. In this age of the internet, fact checking can be done effortlessly and without having to have a formal education. Let me set him straight.

Today, a black man can enter any restaurant or lunch counter anywhere in America, including the deep south, and sit down next to a white man without fear of being lynched. Or even frowned upon.

And we haven't learned?

No more are there two sets of bathrooms or drinking fountains, one labeled white and one labeled colored. Today a black man can drink from any water source he wants to without fear of angering any white people. In fact, it is doubtful that any white people would give him a second glance.

And we haven't learned?

There are no more lynchings, no more black church bombings, no more middle of the night abductions of black people followed by brutal beatings.

And we haven't learned?

No one forces black girls to sit in the back of the bus, or stands in the doorway of schools to block their entrance.

And we haven't learned?

Today Black writers can write editorials that make outrageously racially biased statements without fear of retribution. You couldn't have written your piece in a mainstream newspaper in 1960, Mr. Love.

What haven't we learned?

Yes, Mr. Love, there are isolated incidents where some backward, ignorant, racist, white people burn crosses in front yards and scrawl racist graffiti on black people's houses, etc. But those instances are few and far between. And there are more, much more incidents of black racists committing racially motivated crimes nowadays.

Mr. Love also writes, "The devastation in New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast brought to light the lingering problems of race and class."

Recently some interesting information was reported in newspapers and on television and radio news outlets across the country: More white people were effected adversely by the hurricanes than blacks.

What lingering problems, Mr. Love?

Next, Mr. Love makes this claim:

"And the nation squanders away it's resources on the failed war in Iraq."

Oh really? What exactly, is Mr. Love's criteria for what constitutes a "failed war"?

For the first time since Saddam Hussein gained power in Iraq, free and independent elections have been held. Not just one. Three of them in the last year.

A murderous, vicious, sadistic dictator, who had hundreds of thousands of his own people slaughtered has been deposed.

Torture and rape rooms all over Iraq have been shut down. Women, who up until now, have been treated as second class citizens at best and pack animals at worst, have attained personhood in Iraq.

Note: Let me add here in 2008: The surge is working.

And all this at the cost of many less American lives than have died in any of America's previous wars.

And we haven't learned?

His last point:

"On March 31, 1968 King preached his final sermon...four days before his assassination. In the sermon, he noted that, 'one of the great liabilities of life is that all too many people find themselves living amid a great period of social change, and yet they fail to develop the new attitudes, the new mental responses, and the new situation demands. They end up sleeping through a revolution.''

Mr. Love, it's time to wake up from your 35 year nap, and see what Americans have learned.