THE MARTIN LUTHER KING HOLIDAY

Martin Luther King, Jr. was a man of both courage and vision who aspired to accomplish a great deal for his race. Justice. He accomplished a great deal, and for this his fellow blacks are more than justified in holding him in the highest esteem. But Martin Luther King is not one of Pridger's favorite heroes. Pridger believes he speaks for a significant majority when he admits that he resents the fact that a national holiday has been imposed on the nation in Dr. King's memory. This is not strictly racism speaking here, but a sense of proportion and the opinion that Dr. King's martyrdom and the "Civil Rights movement" is being misused to promote various social ends which would shock him if he were alive to see them.

Neither the father of the country nor the president who preserved the Union and issued the Emancipation Proclamation, rate a national holiday. In fact each of our previous 42 presidents (Washington through Clinton), enjoy a 1/42nd share in a single "Presidents' Day." Perhaps that small proportion is sufficient for many of our former presidents, but there are several of them that did far more for the country than Dr. King did. 

In the end, after his assassination, his dream was taken and twisted to accomplish the ends of social engineers with quite another agenda. Though a great number of his fellow African-Americans have benefited greatly from the resultant transformation of American society, many of the things that have come to pass in the name of Civil Rights, stand in stark contrast to his stated ideals and goals. The significant benefits to a few have come at a ghastly cost to the many, both white and black. If Dr. King could now see the changes that have taken place in his name, it is fairly certain he would be outraged.

Not only was the rich black culture and heritage that produced MLK totally destroyed in the name of Civil Rights, but the white society into which he wished his people to be integrated has suffered precipitous cultural decline as the result of what continues to be billed as the most positive and significant societal transformation in America since the Emancipation Proclamation.

The former black culture has disappeared — all but forgotten — as if there was nothing there worth salvaging. Yet, at the same time it is increasingly celebrated for its contributions to "American culture" — particularly in the the musical arts. In spite of this, most people would say that the culture was "not worth saving" because it had always existed as a separate and unequal second-class culture — the product of slavery and oppression. But it produced many great men of the arts and sciences, as well as reformers such as Martin Luther King himself.

While Dr. King isn't Pridger's hero, Pridger believes his agenda was about building rather than destroying. Pridger doesn't believe that he intended to destroy either white culture or black culture. He merely wanted a just society, in which "his people" could equally share in the material benefits of the larger society.

King's dream has only been realized by a relative few of his people. Smart, successful, middle and upper class blacks are now generally judged (at least by most similarly situated whites), by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. But, unfortunately, this judgment is almost always colored by one significant mental reservation when whites "judge" successful blacks. That, of course, is due to the general belief among whites that most blacks couldn't have made it without the assistance of Affirmative Action programs. This, of course, is often a cruel injustice, but one which is impossible to quantify — and for which there is no legal remedy.

Has Civil Rights resulted in men thenceforth being judged by the content of their characters rather than the color of their skin? Do we have a colorblind society of law which cultivates the true brotherly love among men and women of every race? Are race relations really better today than they were circa 1960? Or is there a smoldering resentment building among both whites and blacks that threatens to boil over at some future date into an social explosion of volcanic proportions?

The tragedy is that the ideal of equal rights for all in a colorblind society might easily have been realized, and Dr. King's dream might have materialized, but for the aggressively punitive intervention of social engineers intent on transforming society overnight — not to facilitate Martin Luther King's dream (in Pridger's opinion), but to remake society according to their own vision, for purposes that had nothing to do with either justice or brotherly love.

The Civil Rights struggle and its aftermath facilitated a revolutionary cultural transformation that almost nobody would have wanted had they actually been able to see the nature and identity of the forces at work and the results that would inevitably follow.

The King holiday is not celebrated in the Pridger household. MLK may be a hero and martyr to his people, but Pridger doesn't consider him a "national hero." This position, of course, is extraordinarily politically incorrect, and will undoubtedly be taken as evidence of racial bias. Of course, Pridger admits to some racial bias — just as he admits to some other biases, such as being a loyal American rather than a loyal Englishman or loyal internationalist. He quite naturally tends to see the world through the prism of a white mans' eyes and admits that. But he believes in justice, which is a universal concept. It is the distain that he holds for the coercive and corrosive white liberal agenda (i.e., political correctness), that prompts him to draw a line through MLK Day on his calendar each year and replace it with Robert E. Lee Day.

Not that Pridger is a Confederate Battle Flag waver, or even all that great of a Robert E. Lee admirer. Though General Lee is still billed as perhaps the most brilliant military strategists of the Civil War, he nonetheless served on the losing side and badly fumbled the most decisive and bloody battle of that tragic, fratricidal, war.

Nor is Pridger a great Abraham Lincoln fan. But Lincoln, having preserved the Union and issued the Emancipation Proclamation, comes a lot closer to being a national hero — a hero for all of the people — than Martin Luther King. Yet the Lincoln holiday was scrapped in favor of King, and now Lincoln's legacy is remembered in a diluted way — along with an increasingly diluted remembrance of several other great presidents who share a single "Presidents Day."

Many, like Pridger, tend to resent the downgrading of such national heroes as Washington, Adams, Madison, Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln since the Civil Rights era. We resent this as well as the literal imposition, by government fiat, of a national holiday for MLK at their expense.

Had the matter of the MLK holiday been put to a popular vote, it would almost certainly have been rejected. It was the first instance of a national holiday being "imposed" upon a nation by Congress without even the presumption of a national consensus. But representative government has long since failed to be representative of, or responsive to, the whole people. And this failure has, to a significant degree, been due to the continuing fallout from the Civil Rights Movement.

Additionally, Pridger strongly suspects that the MLK holiday was mandated as a political expediency — to appease both the newly politically empowered black minority and King family. This as reparations for an assassination in which elements of the federal government likely played a significant, if not the central, role — a crime for which a probably innocent man spent the rest of his life in prison. A man figuratively lynched by the system.

Be this as it may, Dr. King himself deserves ample praise, but the results of his efforts have fallen far short of his intended goals. The shortfall was not his fault, of course. When the political forces he had awakened finally took charge, a new set of injustices were set into motion even as the old were being remedied. The results have been called social progress, but Pridger begs to differ on many counts.

The political forces of which I speak where not at all black. The prospect of large numbers of black voters coming on line prompted large numbers of white politicians, not to mention federal judges, to become the enthusiastic fathers of a new sort of injustice to the whole nation, while calling it the fragrant blossom of justice for the long oppressed black man.

The social changes that were brought about by the Civil Rights have correctly been deemed as significant as those prompted by the Civil War itself. But the Civil War accomplished much more that the preservation of the Union and the emancipation of black slaves, and those changes were not all good. It unequivocally consolidated the power of capital and the money power for all time — a development from which all Americans, black and white (indeed, the whole world), have suffered ever since, though it is most often still celebrated as progress. This was the beginning of the entrenched military-industrial-banking complex which facilitated and even mandated our future imperialism.

The positive result of the Civil Rights struggle was the final abolition of discriminatory and unjust laws based on race. That, of course, is Dr. King's primary legacy, and perhaps the only thing good that has come out of the Civil Rights struggle to date. Had it stopped at that, and we had actually gained a colorblind nation of laws, we would be in much better shape economically and socially than we are today. But what it also did, in a very sneaky and insidious manner, was to further empower and entrench capital in significant ways seldom yet recognized. This was not justice on the march by any stretch of the imagination.

The goal became not a colorblind system of just laws, but to compensate for past injuries and injustices by the imposition of new forms of injustice upon the majority. These new injustices benefited a few at the expense of the many, and literally remade the nation in most significant ways.

Forced integration, in its various corrosive forms, caused the literal implosion and destruction of many of our greatest cities and industrial centers, while merely rearranging the patterns of segregation. Whole white urban populations voted with the only means left to them by an unjust system — their feet. This great exodus from the the urban centers to the suburbs opened the doors of opportunity for capital interests to begin a wholesale remake of the nation's retail trade system — replacing individual commercial enterprise with corporate chains and a new system of corporate franchises. These were not positive developments, in spite of America's continuing and still developing infatuation with the automobile, suburban malls, fast food, and cheap imports.

Another significant result of forced integration and the wholesale quest for at least the appearance of "race equality at any cost," was a precipitous decline in the quality of education in the nation's public schools, at the very time that education, and educational excellence, were taking on a whole new imperative in a technologically advancing nation and world. This was a social mistake and failure whose impact is being acutely felt today in innumerable ways — not only including the present shortage of highly qualified technicians and skilled professionals, but the very quality of leadership now ascending to high office in the nation.

America can no longer boast of being the most literate nation on earth as it once did. We must swallow our national pride and admit that we have an educational crises of momentous proportions on our hands, and must increasingly import skilled labor from abroad. A significant number of our physicians are now imported from Asia, and significant numbers of high tech jobs are being outsourced to Asia as well, at least partly because we lack sufficient domestic resources of highly skilled technicians. This educational shortfall can be directly attributed to the cascading fallout of Civil Rights. It shouldn't be that way, of course, and that certainly wasn't Dr. King's fault or intention, but that's the way it has been made to play out.

In addition to degrading the entire national culture and educational standards, the great socioeconomic transformation literally destroyed a vigorous and thriving parallel black culture and economy that had developed in spite of the former unjust system, and had produced a vibrant and colorful cultural universe within the greater society — a whole culture of black professionals of every kind, black sports, black educational institutions, a black motion picture industry, and black owned businesses, all uniquely suited to the black experience and identity. That culture, as separate and artificially handicapped as it was, had not only created many great blacks in literally every field, but had created many great Americans, including Martin Luther King himself. All of this was quickly dismantled — sacrificed upon the alter of supposed justice, and the assumed desirability of making a single integrated and amalgamated culture out to two distinct and equally valuable cultures.

The rise of the welfare state, which was naturally perceived as a necessary auxiliary to Civil Rights, helped destroy individual initiative in significant segments of both the white and black populations. It, along with other cultural phenomenon, ushered in the pressures that helped destroy the nuclear family among the poor of both races, but with a particularly negative impact upon the black family and the black race as a whole. It made a whole generation believe that welfare was an entitlement that not only facilitated individual independence, but declared that such entitlements also conveyed personal dignity.

Significantly, food stamps were imprinted with the depiction of the famous painting of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Included in the fallout of this national welfare policy was the fact that a large segment of the menial labor classes no longer had to accept the menial forms of employment they would have been compelled to accept in the past. In effect, welfare recipients were placed on permanent paid vacation at taxpayer expense. This, naturally, caused a vacuum in the lower levels of the job market, and less fortunate Mexicans began to increasingly flood across the border to fill that vacuum.

Now that welfare reform has passed, the former welfare class is still not obliged to take just any employment. Training for skilled jobs has become the new entitlement – so former welfare recipients can find employment in jobs that provide the requisite dignity of an independent people. But, alas! Mexicans continue to flood across the border in ever increasing numbers, now increasingly filling construction and skilled jobs – a situation that is now supposedly beginning to trouble our trusty national leadership.

One of the most contentious forms of injustice to come down the pike as part of the Civil Rights agenda, and the one that gets the most press, has been "Affirmative Action" in its various forms, a blatant system of reverse discrimination designed to give the victims of past discrimination a leg up in higher education and the job market. No doubt many blacks have benefited from this who would not have made the grade otherwise, but at the expense of others who were equally deserving who were thus delivered a handicap many could not overcome.

In addition to not being very conductive to good race relations, Affirmative Action has had another negative effect. No successful black person, no matter how brilliant, can escape the stigma of suspicion that his accomplishments would not have been possible except by special breaks not accorded to whites. In fact, for every black person given a special break in college and job pursuits, an equally deserving poor white person had been prevented from realizing his or her potential.

In spite of all of this, the liberal media, minority rights organizations, and organizations like the ACLU and ADL praise the results of Civil Rights and the legacy of Martin Luther King in glowing terms, celebrating how much better America has become because of Civil Rights. Prior to Civil Rights, they say, we lived in a deprived and backward society that was not only unjust and uncivil, but downright cruel. For example, they remind us that back in the 50's the lynching of blacks were still going on, particularly in the south.

True enough, the lynching of blacks has become just about as rare as the lynching of whites since the 1950's. There was, of course, a clear pattern of discrimination reflected in the lynching statistics of the nation. Many more blacks were lynched than whites. The ratio of black to white lynching varied widely, however. For example, in 1885, when white vigilantes still held sway in parts of the frontier west, there were 106 whites lynched, but only 78 black lynched. By the mid nineteen-twenties, the instances of whites being lynched had dwindled to a mere trickle, and sometimes not one in a given year. Blacks fared a little worse, but the number of lynching had decreased to nil by 1969. In fact all nature of white on black crime is now relatively rare – certainly much rarer than black on white crime. But every instance of white on black crime is given plenty of press coverage. But the toll of black on black crime has literally mushroomed since Civil Rights, and eclipses, the death tolls of the worst periods of KKK or vigilante justice directed by whites against blacks.

Every nature of crime has become so prevalent in the black community that they hardly constitute "news" or merit press coverage. This, in itself, is often viewed as evidence of white apathy toward the black condition, and further indication of continuing white racism.

John Q. Pridger