Today smells like dirty mop water, when it should smell like Revolution

Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day.  I slept in until about 11 am. I will finish this blog piece, and then go to the gym. I’ll stop by the supermarket (a snow storm is coming) then ill do some laundry.  I’ll end my night with a movie of maybe a fashion magazine.

This isn’t so different that what I did on this day last year, or the year before. In general, I don’t do “Community Service” on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. On a micro level community service is good. Even having a designated day of community service once a year is good, because that’s the only time some people will do it. However, on the macro level, equating Dr. King’s legacy with paintbrushes and mop buckets is so problematic for me that I can’t participate.

The watering down of this man’s legacy is appalling. It starts with taking his name out of the day; how many Happy “MLK” posts have you seen so far?  We can’t even take 5 more seconds to type out the man’s full name.  We pass around that “Everyone can be great because everyone can serve,” quote instead of his quotes about American Imperialism, anti war, anti racism, and improved opportunity for African Americans (which are in fact far more numerous.) We somehow turned fighting for equal rights, economic opportunity and an ending of police harassment into cleaning up a park and painting a school building. I’m sorry, I didn’t know Dr. King was jailed and assassinated for demanding the right to do community service!!!

I understand that school buildings are falling apart. I understand that it is a lovely gesture to provide a newly painted classroom for our children. It’s nice to show them that we care about them. But this doesn’t get the crux of the problem. The problem is that many (most even) public schools that are predominately black are underfunded. They are underfunded because in our draconian funding system schools are funding primarily through property tax. The property in these neighborhoods aren’t worth a whole lot, and the property tax rate is low too…probably because if it were any higher people couldn’t afford to live there…which is because blacks on average make less money and have less net worth that whites….because they went to those same crappy schools there underfunded 20 years ago.  This goes for any social problem that calls for “community service” to serve as a way to elevate it. If you look deep enough you will find systems of inequality that are The REAL problems.  When are we going to stand up to THAT?  

I think people in my generation are just too damn comfortable. Our parents marched with Dr. King. Our parents were the ones who were shipped out to white neighborhoods on school buses to desegregate the schools. Our parents were the ones spit on and called niggers and attacked by police dogs. They went through a lot so that we can have it easier. But things still aren’t right. Black men and women are still being arrested more frequently and serving longer sentences for the same crimes whites commit. Black men are still being stopped by the police at higher rates than whites. Our black children are LITERALLY being molested and abused by police officers. There are enough abandoned homes in the U.S. to give one to every homeless person (blacks are disproportionally homeless too.) Too many of us are still poor, busted and disgusted! I’d like to see a “Day of Service” where we service each other by finding ways to fight these issues. Can we have a Martin Luther King Day of anti police brutality marches? How about a day of boycotting corporations that lobby to keep the minimum wage low and don’t pay any taxes? How about a day when we all protest in from out our congressional representatives houses?  Or day where we show our combined economic power and don’t purchase ANYTHING for 24 hours?

The things I listed above probably won’t happen. It takes strategy, long suffering and a lot of courage to stand up to our oppressors. Systemic change can’t be done in a day, and we are a generation that likes immediate gratitude. Why do that when we can just volunteer at a soup kitchen for a few hours and then treat ourselves for a “job well done” to some take out and Netflix afterwards? Things aren’t as bad as they were in the 50s and 60s, right?  The truth is we pass around that quote about service, and then do community service for a day because it’s the easiest, least controversial way to “honor” his legacy.

I got an email from a friend about donating clothes to the homeless on Marin Luther King Day as a form of community service. I honestly could not help. I just dropped off a large bag of clothing to the Circle of Hope thrift a couple weeks ago (I drop off things I don’t need to them 4-5 times a year) I was thinking about driving two hours to see Dr. Angela Davis speak tomorrow night but instead I’m going to community meting about the incident with the teenager and the police mentioned above. I’m not saying all this to toot my own horn – but rather to show that I’m constantly doing things to help others and fight the power. That’s how we all should be. And we don't need to turn a man's legacy into community service to do so.