On the Feast of St. Martin Luther King

We pause.  I'm OK with him, really.  I think he was a great and courageous man who gave the last full measure of devotion to a noble cause.  I just, well, have hard time getting into the King worship of it all. I think it's my age.  I am just old enough to remember the bricks of Traditional America being dismantled based on, among other things, the idea that it was soooooo unenlightened for nations to make gods and heroes out of old dead guys.  That's what the unhip generations did before ours came along.  That's why no small amount of time was taken unpacking the sins, failings, and flaws of those other guys we used to look up to, like Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt (take your pick).  Fair enough.  If we want to move on, let's move on. 

So it came as quite a shock when many of the most fervent disciples of 'we're so beyond that' thinking were the ones who turned around and helped make Dr. King into the closest thing to a god this country has ever had.  Really.  In grade school, my kids would start learning about him on the day after Christmas Winter Break, and would spend the next month learning about him, singing songs, doing plays, making art, giving speeches, community service, you name it.  We never spent that much time on Christmas even in the early 70s.  It's certainly the only holy day that our increasingly secular nation will allow to be venerated in a proper spirit, and not the spirit of the See of Wall Street.

So forgive me if I seem somewhat blasé about it all.  I just have this thing about taking people at their word.  If one of the reasons why we had to stop all the hero worship America used to indulge in was because that's just so medieval, then let's do it.  I would hate to think all the lofty ideals of those progressives were really a ruse designed to throw down the establishments they disliked in order to replace them with their own.  Nah, I'm sure it wasn't that.