Martin Luther King Jr. did more for this country than anyone else who has ever lived. He fought for racial justice; he fought for economic justice; and he fought against war. He was a great fighter -- but he was also a man of love and peace.
I'm not going to spend the whole diary explaining why MLK was great. I think most of us know that already (the media is always great at honoring heroes once they are dead). Instead, I want to talk about how MLK was ordinary. Dr. King was a regular man. He was afraid. He made mistakes. He was petty. Dr. King's sister recently recounted her memories of Martin Luther King.
Dr. King is a great hero and he should be honored. But he should not be mythologized. The right wins when we pretend that MLK only spoke about issues that ceased to be relevant 40 years ago - when we ignore his struggles for economic justice or against militarism. This is Dr. King:
And so is this (Dr. King's sister recounting his story):
Farris says she had no inkling that her brother would become such an iconic figure. She remembers the little brother who loved playing pool, doing the jitterbug dance and telling jokes. She also recalls his nickname as a young man: Tweed.
"He had this tweed suit, and he loved it," she said, smiling. "He would wear it so much so the boys nicknamed him Tweed."
I never met Dr. King, but one of the great honors of my life was spending a couple days with the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth. Reverend Shuttlesworth was a contemporary of Martin Luther King and a man whose house was repeatedly bombed by the Klan, yet who preached justice and tolerance. In contemporary politics, Reverend Shuttlesworth was profoundly right about the war in Iraq and in his abiding distaste for George w. Bush. Reverend Shuttlesworth also told a story about Dr. King's gasiousness that was (a) really funny and (b) really humanizing.
And that's the trick. All of us have some Martin Luther King inside ourselves. People on Kos have compared John Edwards and Barack Obama to MLK - and the response by many has been mockery. I think that's the wrong response. We should all try to live our public lives up to MLK's great standard, knowing that most of us will fail to be as good and all (?) of us will fail to reach world-changing hights as high as MLK reached.
But we shouldn't pretend that we live outside of history or that we can't follow in his footsteps. As Dr. King himself said:
Everyone can be great, because everyone can serve.
That's the truth. We can all be great, and we can all be evil. We are living in history and all of us have the power to change it. We don't honor Dr. King when we act like we are powerless.