While the initials “MLK” mean something quite different to me than they do to the rest of the country (I’m married to her), this date remains an important one for this country.
Not just for Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He was a man — an influential man — but the tying of this date to him has had the mixed blessing of providing a personalized example: an heroic icon whose life can be examined and whose achievements cataloged and celebrated, but also a man whose flaws (and the sins and goofiness committed in his name) can be used to discredit all that the day is meant to represent, which is the triumph of the human spirit over oppression, the achievement of peaceful change against injustice, and the (ever-unfolding) recognition that all are created equal, not just those born with the “right” gender and skin color (etc.).
It makes me wonder — do we live in a post-heroic age? Did the idolization of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, such that their birthdays were made national holidays, run into similar problems? Or are we too prone to look for clay feet these days, too quick to dismiss the good of a man if we can pick out a flaw?
I can point to any number of individuals involved in the Civil Rights movement of the 60s and find dirt on any of them, or note how some ideas they had were as screwy as others of their ideas were profound. Heck, I can point to how excesses of the movement, and venality amongst some of its leadership (to this day) have had negative impacts on the nation and on the groups the movement sought to protect.
Nonetheless, our nation, as a whole, is profoundly better off for the pain and sacrifice and dedication to purpose of those civil rights leaders and the thousands and millions who followed them. And if we let the flaws of that era and its principals obscure the good that came of it — the escape from Jim Crow and separate drinking fountains and racial (among other forms) discrimination being not only present but legally condoned and enforced — then we’ve become part of the problem as much as we are inheritors of the solution.