It’s Martin Luther King Day again, Save Jerseyans, one of America’s high secular holy days which most government workers and corporate employees celebrate by sitting home and watching Netflix. Well, that’s not entirely fair of me: I’m sure some of them are skiing.
You’re also going to see the annual glut of trite social media tributes to the late Dr. King from politicians, friends, coworkers and random fellow users. 90% of those tributes will be 100% bullshit, of course, dripping with the stale odor of gross insincerity and obvious ignorance.
Why? First of all… peer pressure. Humans feel like they need to say something when everyone else is. The Ukrainian flag emoji, the mask in the supermarket, the clicked-and-pasted MLK quote. I’m not equating these causes; I’m simply poining out that they often come about owing to the same impulse.
Many others don’t understand Dr. King’s vision because it doesn’t fit nearly with today’s politics. They want him to fit THEIR politics in 2023, but this man of the mid-20th century held some very conservative views and some very far-Left views. He held unambiguously Marxist economic positions by way of example; meanwhile, he once responded to a letter from a gay youth seeking help by explaining that homosexual attraction was likely “culturally acquired” and a condition capable of being “solved.”
Americans also continue to grapple with King’s most famous declaration: “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.”
The Left increasingly choose to read into King’s words an endorsement of critical race theory, the notion that equity can only be achieved if racism is read into – and then uprooted from – every aspect of American society. They’re obsessed with skin color, gender, ethnicity, etc., and they’rewilling to weaponize the superficialities of the human condition for temporal political gain. We are currently watching our transportation system collapse under the failed stewardship of a transportation secretary who was appointed SOLELY because he happens to be gay. Do I care that he’s gay? Nope. Do I think competence should’ve been a more important hiring criterion? You bet.
Meanwhile, the same Leftists who think Pete Buttigeg overseeing the collapse of our air travel industry is some species of progress routinely work to enshrine “structural racism” elsewhere in society, most notably in the education system where they dogmatically collude with teacher’s unions to block school choice reforms.
I can’t speak for MLK, but he didn’t strike me as someone who wanted to see his “four little children” and everyone else’s children live in a world where it’s assumed prejudices are assigned at birth and progress is only possible through obsessive (and sometimes punitive) labeling. The more reasonable conclusion is to assume that Dr. King meant what he said: the goal is to reach a point when blackness, whitness, browness, yellowness, whatever, is of little to no importance in the public arena. No more critical to your prospects than whether you’re fat, short, tall, skinny, wear blue hats or enjoy skiing.
If you’re not down with all of that?
Think twice before clicking “share” on that reflexive MLK tribute this morning. Have you really thought about it? And do you really mean it?
_
MATT ROONEY is SaveJersey.com’s founder and editor-in-chief, a practicing New Jersey attorney, and the host of ‘The Matt Rooney Show’ on 1210 WPHT every Sunday evening from 7-10PM EST.
