Big Thinking

I had a chance to check out Washington DC's new Martin Luther King memorial earlier this week. A big opening ceremony featuring President Barack Obama and other significant guests scheduled for this weekend has been postponed for an approaching hurricane, but the memorial is open to visitors, and I found a large and enthusiastic crowd on the day I dropped by.

I was surprised -- maybe I shouldn't have been? -- that nearly everybody besides me who came out to see the memorial was African-American. This points to a disappointing fact I've observed before: even though Martin Luther King has now been enshrined in American history as a legend, a hero and a cliche, his great universal message of activism through nonviolent resistance remains largely neglected and misunderstood in America and around the world. The King approach to solving problems feels every bit as startlingly innovative and unique today as it did in the 1960s. The miraculous fact that King's patient, compromise-based approach can actually succeed in solving "unsolvable" conflicts remains widely ignored, even though the problems we face today are as severe as the problems King faced so brilliantly and successfully in his time. Most people would rather gripe, whine and fight each other than take a risk on loving their neighbors and trying to truly understand and cope with variant points of view.

Martin Luther King never had an easy time getting his peaceful message across. It's well known today that he and his fellow activists had to endure vicious taunts and provocations by their opponents, but King also took a hard beating, often for different reasons, in the allegedly liberal mainstream media, and another hard beating from many of his fellow African-American activists. Like any leader who tries to compromise and rise above the pettiness of simple hatred, he took it from the left and the right, from black and white, from north and south. An early John Updike short story called "Marching Through Boston", published in the New Yorker in January 1966, delivers a refreshingly direct look at how Martin Luther King was seen in his own time.

I wish it were possible for me to write about difficult political issues without hearing in my head the exhausted groans of so many, many people I know who react to any type of political discussion the way they'd react to a pinprick. I have many political beliefs -- I proudly call myself a pacifist, a libertarian, a moderate progressive -- but perhaps my most deeply-held political belief is this: civil debate is always a good thing. Talking about politics is not a waste of time, and it doesn't have to devolve into the familiar noise of, as songwriter Stephen Stills once so aptly put it, "hooray for our side".

Not long ago a friend who writes for Litkicks asked me what kind of articles I'd like to see in the future. I said that I'd like more topical relevance, more political/social engagement (I said this partly because I knew this writer was highly knowledgeable in this area). But her response showed that I'd tripped some kind of trigger by mentioning the word "political". She wrote:

I'm not a big "espouse the party ideals" kind of person.

I was very surprised by this reaction. I wrote back that I already knew this, and that this was why I'd thought her contributions might be valuable. But her response points to a popular general perception that modern political writing is equivalent to party-line hackwork. This is really a shocking and disappointing development. Of course an article that follows a party line is useless, and of course I wouldn't want to run an article like that on Litkicks. To be useful, a political article must straddle a fence. It must address both sides of a difficult issue, and reach for a synthesis that might persuade some readers to change the way they think. That's the whole point of political writing, isn't it? But I'm afraid it's become a habit for readers to automatically dismiss political debate as pointless self-congratulation. This leaves many people like me, who'd like to sincerely debate controversial and important topics and learn from the experience, with nobody to play with.

Wednesday's post about the lack of international/intercultural communication on the Internet got my wheels turning. I think there's more to this topic.

Cultural insularity is the world's status quo, and there is currently no momentum at all towards a global language. Sure, the Esperanto organization still runs annual conferences, but we all know Esperanto was a well-intentioned dud. It was founded in 1887 with the publication of a book called Lingvo Internacia by Lazar Zamenhov, a Polish Jew. The movement was a hit, but the language never took root, and by the time Zamenhov died in 1917 Europe was in its worst depths of violence. The Great War provided insurmountable proof that Zamenhov's ideas about global peace through global communication were naive. (His children were then persecuted and murdered during World War II for being Jewish, being Baha'i, and being related to Lazar Zamenhov).

Unless you're color-blind like me (yes, I'm color-blind, and yes, that probably does explain the color scheme here on Literary Kicks), you probably see two different color chips in the photo above.

Well, I don't. Neither did my brother Gary (who is also color-blind, naturally, since it's a deterministic genetic trait, and I'd really like it if people would start calling us "color-capable" instead of "color-blind", but that's another topic) this weekend when we both played poker at the Gulfstream casino in Miami, Florida. I have no idea what colors you see when you look at these chips. But what Gary and I both see is one tan-green-orange-gray chip that says "$25" and another tan-green-orange-gray chip that says "$5".