Martin Luther King Jr. Day
His message speaks very loud to us today and our divisive world of intolerance and political tyranny.
It’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day and it’s a day to reflect on the man and more importantly what he stood for - social justice and civil rights.
It’s a very important message today as we see further divide between peoples on all levels - race, income, political beliefs.
Martin Luther King’s core message is that of disobedience to unjust laws, regulations, behaviors. That what makes a man is his character, his inner conscience and naught else.
Dr. King was also not just pie in the sky rhetoric. He was a man of action. Words without actions don’t make for change. He was also a driven man, a man of fierce emotion and drive - he wouldn’t let anything get in his way. Here his daughter shares a video clip of her dad, precisely illustrating that. He was a revolutionary, a point we often forget.
Martin Luther King stood up and walked and marched for our essential freedoms. The rights of man. That each of us has the rights of speech, assembly, press, the right to our own body, our own mind. He’s a man we honor because he spoke for those marginalized, those shamed, those who needed hope. He spoke power for the powerless.
In my own field, English language teaching, Martin Luther King Jr. would have said the following, regarding the discrimination most English teachers face in finding employment in the face of widespread “native speakerism”.
My favorite message of Dr. King is that of one of his finest speeches - The Drum Major Instinct. The message that we all can serve. We all need to step up and serve the community to be great.
Let’s all honor the man by going forth into the world in service of justice, in service of the rights of man, in service of freedoms. Then, we will truly be on the mountaintop and able to see his promised land.