Monday, January 17, 2005

I will now mount my Soapbox

Today on NPR they took a break from their usual programming to "pay tribute" to Martin Luther King. I am not all that interested because I am too young to have been touched by the power of the civil rights movement that he stood for, and I am a white sub-urban college educated male. I live in a very white community in a very white region of the US, and race does not affect me and I do not think about race on a day to day basis. I know some mexicans and some native americans, but they both pass and it does not seem to affect them, or me.

At first I was thinking that people (NPR) try too hard to revere MLK in an attempt to appear to serve a monority listener base, but then it occurred to me that the best reason to do this programming it is not to serve the black listeners, but to serve the white listeners. MLK day isn't neccesarily about how many blacks you have in your community, but how many you don't have. States like Arizona need MLK day the most because the white people that get on radio talk shows and talk about what bullshit MLK day is, are the people that most need to be reminded of where our nation has been.

I am not sure MLKs birthday deserves a national holiday and most of the presidents and patriots of our nation don't, but so long as there are people out there that think that civil rights and equality are bullshit, I will continue to support this holiday (even though i don't get to take the day off).

end Soapbox.

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