King still the King?

Martin Luther King is possibly the most unanimously celebrated figure in American history. This is because his words and his philosophy- that we should love all of mankind despite any physical or even cultural barriers- are pretty palatable to everyone, including people with a lot of power. It's pretty much required that you absolutely agree with everything he said. But there's a serious blind spot in America's concept of King, and it lies in the fact that people don't actually believe what he said at all. It's really easy to go along with King-worship when you can just talk about love and universality, when you can reference his speeches from Capitol Hill or quote him to your class, when you can profess to believe in what he said without actually delineating a plan or a policy to move closer to his ideals. People repeat what he said without talking about what he actually meant. It's as if his preacherly southern drawl is what we remember and not the words he spoke with it.

The idea of universal human love is actually very radical. Practicing universal human love would involve a fundamental change in the way America governs itself. We would have to love the Iraqi people. We would have to love the Taliban. We would have to love Al Qaeda. We would even have to love Osama bin Laden, and to understand that even he is our same species. A lot of people would call this a total perversion of King's ideas and say that these people are standing in the way of equality and prosperity and therefore must be stopped, but that's simply not what Martin Luther King thought. He, like Ghandi, believed that loving the group that oppresses you is the only way to break their stranglehold and the only way to move forward. What I said is simply the logical extention of his I Have a Dream speech, simply an update of King's statements. And that is absolutely unacceptable for the American power structure. So we turn his birthday into a day off and talk about how great he was without discussing any real context for his words, while every day in the Middle East we violate his dream in ways more violent and oppressive than even those used against King himself.