More Holiday Than Ever

More Holiday Than Ever

MLKDay14Today is one of the most important holidays for political America, the Martin Luther King federal holiday. It’s impossible to understate its importance this year.

The current xenophobic administration is poised to make illegal 800,000 young people Friday at midnight. Starting in the wee hours Saturday morning, the embodiment of “I Have a Dream,” King’s famous speech, today America’s “Dreamers” face being deported to places they have never seen.

It’s unthinkable. I mostly expect a week from today I’ll reread these words and smile to myself, reaffirming my lack of understanding “American politics.” Running a contentious issue up to the wire somehow advantages one or other of the opposing viewpoints, or so the advocates believe. God I hope this will be the case.

Then all we’ll have to deal with are the psychological scars, job displacement and negative economic impact all of this has had. And the better of us will point out what a waste the fight was, another meaningless battle in the long and violent history of America.

Martin Luther King is one of the most important American holidays to me personally. Year after year I retrieve the blog I wrote from the year before and build on it. This year, in fact, I had an entirely different blog. It was to criticize the King family for keeping his so famous speech in copyright protection. In any other era that would be an extremely explosive issue, worthy of hot debate.

It seems like a match flicker in the far away mountains this morning.

What has happened to America? How have we been so upended?

[Note to self: this was not the blog posted on this date, but the draft of what was posted a year later.]

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