Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

Martin Luther King, Jr, From The Call of Service, (Quoted by Philip Yancey in Soul Survivor, P. 106-107):

“A big danger for us is the temptation to follow the people we are opposing. They call us names, so we call them names…but I remind you that in many people, in many people called segregationists, there are other things going on in their lives: this person or that person, standing here or there may also be other things – kind to neighbors and family, helpful and good-spirited at work.

You all know, I think, what I’m trying to say – that we must try not to end up with stereotypes of those we oppose, even as they slip all of us into their stereotypes. And who are we? Let us not do to ourselves as others (as our opponents) do to us: try to put ourselves into one all-inclusive category – the virtuous ones as against the evil ones, or the well-educated as against the ignorant. You can see that I can go on and on – and there is the danger: the “us” or “them” mentality takes hold, and we do, actually, begin to run the risk of joining ranks with the very people we are opposing. I worry about this a lot these days.”

On the one hand this is a hugely generous attitude on the part of someone who has been physically and verbally attacked to the degree that Luther and many of his followers were. On the other hand Luther understands that the very real danger exists of becoming the enemy we hate.

Even in more ordinary circumstances there is a huge application of this principle to the people we interact with all day long. Take note of how many times throughout the day you see people but don't really see them because you trivialize them by categorizing them. These people become invisible to us because we know them by only one fact - how they relate to us in a given context. They are "that kind of customer," or "this kind of driver." They are "a religious person," "an atheist," a "conservative," "a liberal," and so on. We know nothing of these people (and they know nothing of us). In reality they are not anything like our charicature of them. Each one has his own story. A person is religious for a lot of reasons, or an atheist for a lot of reasons, or a conservative, or a liberal, or a criminal, or an addict, for a lot of reasons. As soon as we fit them with a label we dehumanize them, we rob them of their story, of the history of their relationships, their successes and failures, their endearing qualities and their secrets. They become invisible and can be eliminated. They can be demeaned, ignored, even beaten, alienated, and discarded. Follow any of the debates going on in the blogs or various internet venues and see if this is not happening unceasingly among intelligent, educated people today. The most frequent argument used in any debate is the ad hominem argument. Martin Luther King, Jr., still has a lot to teach us today.