Well the day's about done. I have no special insights into Martin Luther King Jr.; indeed, as a straight white guy who hasn't had to fight for my *own* rights, I'm certain I understand him less than most. Even so, I can't let the day pass without marking it. So I want to talk about what the day itself means to me.
This is the day when people who 'don't see race' see race. This is the day when even the racists that opposed Dr King stop and venerate and try to claim some small piece of his mantle. This is the day when a government that tried to crush the struggle for equality bows its head and commemorates that it was wrong. It's the ultimate proof that you can't unbend the long arc. It's a day the powerless wrested from the powerful. It belongs not just to MLK, but to those who came after him and fought to enshrine his legacy and make him something more than just an extraordinary leader gone too soon.
Of all the Federal Holidays, this is the most important. Holidays, the real ones, the ones people get off from work, are culture. Labor Day has its rituals now. Memorial Day does too. They may not be as loud and omnipresent as Halloween or Independence Day, but people talk about what they mean and remind eachother why they're not at work. Holidays are culture. Christmas wasn't always important to people; it became important to people by its rites and rituals.
As we continue to observe rights of remembrance, to make this day more than just a 3-day weekend, may we suffuse it with meaning. May we join the man whose birth the day marks and whose blood the day bought, and join his successors who toiled to earn that day recognition, and may we do our part to fill that vessel with our hopes and our dreams and our memories and our tragedies our rites and our rituals until it has taken on all of our power and swung the other 364 days like the heavy pommel at the end of an unwieldy sword.
MLK day matters to me because its a foothold. It's a shoulder in the door or pamphlet in the hand or graffiti on the wall injecting the subversive transformative idea into our society that we are all us.