ML King’s Memorial opens

The “I have a dream” speech is included among literary materials I share with my Oral English class in China. It appears that students latching on the phrase “let freedom ring” in their vocabulary are not unfamiliar with the Southern Baptist minister’s speech before the throng of the Civil Rights March in Washington, D.C. of August 1963.

One of the Chinese songs I appropriated earlier this year is titled The Butterfly with an English version sang by the same artist. The class emphasis is for students to speak English more rather than memorizing facts about oral English. I play the English version of the butterfly song in class, ask class members to write the words they hear, ignoring spelling and grammar, and then repeat the song they heard. Already familiar with the tune in Chinese, the segue to English does not take much effort.

In Sino symbology, the butterfly represents dreaming, not the idle and escapist kind but of the type where one is compelled to translate reflection to a “therefore” and then do it. A student asked if he made a right career choice in his academic course and I turned the question back to his view of the three most important issues of his generation. I added: “If your academic choice does not address any of those issues, then you need to decide again, and make your academic life relevant to your chosen career.”

Martin Luther King Jr.’s dreaming was not idle. Nor is the dreaming in the Sino metaphor used in Shenyang Aerospace University where the English prospectus boldly declares: Dreams are rising from SAU. There is nothing fuzzy about Premier Wen Jiabao speech’s in the Peoples Congress early this year about putting a man in the moon by 2030.

We are familiar with the post-splitting-of-the-atom comments by those who contributed to the research, of their dismay at how knowledge was turned into the most devastating instrument of mass destruction in humanity’ arsenal of deadly folly. The rush in our time to use new pharmacological discoveries and nutrient additives is proving to have grave consequences in side effects of chemical intrusions into our body metabolisms.

The National Mall by the Potomac where the nation’s memorial parks, museums, and art galleries are situated is dotted with memorials to individuals—Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Jackson, Grant, Garfield, Jackson, etc.—along with the WWII, Korean and Vietnam wars. Now comes MLK of the Civil Rights movement on a few acres on line sight between the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials.

Opened a week before the formal ceremonies on Aug. 28, the date of the “I have a dream” speech, the solemn occasion slated to commemorate the historic speech was upended by ferocious Hurricane Irene, which just prolonged the controversies that dog the memory of the only person of color memorialized in the National Mall.

As a young man, we marched in Washington, D.C. with Dr. King when it became obvious to the Civil Rights movement that the practical issue of supporting the War on Poverty suffers when one also waged a war of attrition in Southeast Asia, as has been true with other subsequent wars.

There will be those who will focus intensely, and sometimes solely, on MLK’s work on the racial issue but we followed him because he elevated his cause to the fundamental and broader arena of human right’s issue.

Our work through the years validated this inescapable reality, that one window of human issue is useful only to the degree that it leads us to see the totality of issues, and invites us to design comprehensive but strategic and tactical responses to them.

We once dealt with schistosomiasis/bilharzia/snail fever caused by a parasitic worm in drinking water victimizing vulnerable children. When we lowered the infant mortality, it became obvious that surviving children’s adequate sustenance into adulthood, education, productive engagement in the economy, meaningful significance of individual and social life took relevance and urgency. Mothers’ roles and fathers’ participation involved a deluge of issues as well. A segmented approach bureau-by-bureau, as the public sector in the factory-line-model is structured to work, is doomed to failure. Nothing but a comprehensive vision and mission that involve all the stakeholders and all issues addressed simultaneously will do.

That to me, this is MLK, Jr.’s realization when he took the podium in Memphis and declared in the metaphors of his tradition that he has “been to the mountaintop.” He became lucid that racism does not only enslave one group, it diminishes the humanity of all. The same holds true when we insist on unsustainable economics that exploits labor and devastates the environment to raise the bottom line, of politics that permits only the few to decide on behalf of the many, and of cultural forms that locates the focus of existence in an escapist Other World, or of racial purity, or ethnic superiority, rather than in the immediacy, immanent, transcendent and transparent here-and-now.

Memorializing his memory is a challenge to our vocation. The King is dead! MLK, Jr. is here. Long live the King!