MLK AND A DAY IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM

Driving from Newport, Rhode Island to Philadelphia on my way to fire fighting school back in 1986, I had the radio tuned to a channel of the People's Radio and chanced to hear an excellent program about a man almost nobody ever speaks of anymore; Malcolm X. The station played excerpts from many of his speeches and writings as he grew and developed over his brief time on Earth.  I came to think that he was my kind of rabble-rouser. I could feel the power of the words in his speeches. He was not communicating thoughts he derived from his contemplation of God's words. He was talking like an angry man with much to be angry about. His words contributed directly to his assassination. I never heard his speeches until I was 25 and a brand new graduate of the Navy's Department Head School.

Today is one set aside by the nation to remember another man who was also cut down in his prime by an assassin. The 1960's were a seemingly endless series of assassinations. Diem, shot by friends of Kennedy. JFK killed by a communist 20 days later. Black Nationalist Malcom X, Nazi party leader George Rockwell, Martin Luther King, Jr., and RFK, all assassinated. All of them men who made the decision to enter the arena of ideas, and all but one, coldly agreeable to assassination and murder if that was the price demanded to change the world.

Oddly enough, I have sympathy for just about all of them. They wanted to make it a better world. Each of them wanted to make it over in his own image. One wanted a black nationalist world. You can find that if you like for there are a lot of places where black nationalism has triumphed. Diem who just wanted to survive there at the end. His ambitions there were as doomed as his country. JFK and RFK were going to make a better world for their kind of people. You can see what they meant to achieve in Massachusetts to this day.

Martin Luther King wanted something a little different. "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

I believe in words. Each word means a specific thing. Words without qualification mean what they say and nobody gets to qualify another person's words. That is deceitful and lacks honesty and integrity. When JFK spoke to Congress and said, "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth," nobody tried to dissimulate his words and their clear meaning and parse it to say anything else. Nobody that mattered tried to add, "if we can afford it or if it isn't too dangerous or if it is technically feasible." We accepted it as the goal and worked to accomplish it.

I think we can all get along if we work at it but there has to be a firm foundation of agreement on what it is that we are working for. If we want an end to discrimination then we should probably stop discriminating. If we want a meritocracy where people are allowed to rise to whatever level of accomplishment they can by merit and luck then we should probably take our thumbs off the scale when parceling out merit and luck. If we believe that we should give it all over and live in a peaceful and harmonious society than surely that is the one that most requires the positive assent of each member to agree to participate in such a society and also it must include a path out for those that do not desire to live in a Society of Friends.

This country used to have a common foundation that was built on a common understanding of the documents of the founding of the country which were taught by the free education that is provided to every child. The educators taught elementary math, reading, writing and the basics of a literate society to everyone. The elite and the devoutly religious sent their children to private schools that employed the same teachers to teach the same subjects. The subjects were identical. The method and nature of the instruction varied widely. Literacy, fluency and mathematical reasoning was the path to a better life. A firm grasp of those subjects lifted all who sought mastery of them.

To everyone's continual amazement, that fundamental baseline is what has been screwed up. Failure to achieve upward mobility in society today can be laid almost exclusively at the feet of a failure to become literate and the inability to reason mathematically. When I look at the enormous number of people that the U.S. Military simply will not recruit because they cannot read or perform simple arithmetic I become angry at how 12 years of free education was shit on. How did we screw that up?

It was there! It was right there! It was shining and sparkly and just within our grasp and we let it get away!

I know what people say about schools and teachers and I don't say any of that. I went to 9 different schools counting kindergarten through high school. They all had one thing in common. They made an extraordinary effort to teach children who came to school and wanted to learn and for the most part they did that very well. My last school was motivated solely by the money and did its best to keep kids in school. It tried hardest to reach the kids that were done learning and it was also the worst of the schools I attended. The other schools looked at the hard-core refuseniks and allowed them to saunter off to whatever pursuits they thought a more fit use of their learning time.

There had to be someone at home that cared about learning if it was going to happen. If nobody successfully communicated the importance of learning and provided the discipline to force it, it was over.

What Martin Luther King, and what we all wish for our children, can now be achieved in the United States by any child that learns to read and write, and learns mathematics and can graduate from school.

I spent my whole life in environments where nobody cared about your background or skin color. The only thing that mattered was if you could do the job. It would be nice if you bathed regularly, were pleasant and had a reasonable sense of humor, but really it boiled down to nothing more than whether or not you were up to the job.

I think Martin Luther King's dream has become a reality. If you can fit yourself into Society, it will make room for you to flourish. Did you know the military simply won't induct 75% of the age eligible applicants because they don't meet the minimum standards expected of members of that society?

If you want a new dream for the new millennium, discover what to do with the millions of people that turned their back on education and learning and declined to take part in society or join the Race.* We mostly lock them up after we tire of them. There has to be a better way and it isn't going to be found in spending more money on schools, teachers, prisons or youth activities. It's going to take something new under the sun.

*The Race of Reason of course.