As You Celebrate the Moral Courage of MLK, Understand That You Most Likely Are a Moral Coward

On this Monday following the Sunday, 15 January, birthday of Martin Luther King, we celebrate a person of towering moral courage, even as most of those who gather in remembrance of his dedication insult his ethical bravery with their own moral cowardice.

 

You must admit the likelihood of your own moral cowardice and, after you literally look in the mirror and then metaphorically peer into the reflection of your soul, you must decide what you are going to do about your own lassitude and your own cowardice.

 

For those of you who are physically or mentally infirm, or because of anatomical and physiological degradation over a long life just do not have the energy to act on your convictions---   you have legitimate reasons for your inaction.

 

But for those of you who are healthy in body and brain, and who have enough youthful energy to act upon the causes in which you believe, you must take stock and either act or accept that you are living a life of moral abomination.

 

The articles on this blog are fact-laden and the result of tight logical reasoning.  If you scroll on down this blog, you will see article after article replete with facts pertinent to the inner workings of the Minneapolis Public Schools.  The articles that will first come into view are drawn from Part One of three parts of my nearly complete book, Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools:  Current Condition, Future Prospect, the first third of the book that presents the stark objective facts concerning a school district the officials and board of which have been enormously inept in delivering an education of even minimal acceptability, much less the education of excellence that our precious children deserve.

 

In Part Two (Analysis) and Part Three (Philosophy) of the book, I analyze the objective data presented in Part One and then show the way to a better future based on the philosophy and program that must undergird the processes by which we overhaul the staff, the curriculum, and the institutional  structures of the Minneapolis Public Schools.

 

The question for you, my readers, is now and upon reading my book in its entirety will even more be, how you yourselves are going to participate in the overhaul of the Minneapolis Public Schools.

 

Every second Tuesday of each month (with a few calendric scheduling adjustments from time to time), the members of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education meet, arranging themselves on either side of new (his tenure is now six months) Superintendent Ed Graff.  The articles that appear immediately after this piece that you are presently reading detail how this group cannot as presently constituted bring an education of excellence to the students of this key urban district of Minnesota.  Furthermore, those articles detail how the staff of about 550 members occupying offices of the Davis Center at 1250 West Broadway cannot possibly, given the nature of their inappropriate credentials and ideological inclinations, design a program with any remote possibility of imparting excellent education to the students whom they claim to serve.

 

So on that monthly meeting of Superintendent Graff and the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education, I am first up for Public Comment, each time confronting this group with the facts and the reasoning  according to which they are culpable for the abysmal academic  performance of our precious young people.

 

Many, many of you have come up to me in the shadows and said, effectively, “You go boy.  I sure do agree with what you’re saying.”

 

And, very tellingly, not a single one of you dozen or so staff members at the Davis Center with whom I have met have denied that the facts that I present are accurate, or asserted that the conclusions that I draw are errant.

 

So where does this place you, readers of this blog at the time of our annual celebration of the life of moral courage and dedicated activism of Martin Luther King?

 

Until you yourselves come out of the shadows to act upon your beliefs, the present circumstances place you in a position of moral cowardice.

 

The overhaul of K-12 education is at the center of the present stage of the Civil Rights Movement.  Transforming K-12 education is the fundamental endeavor to which we all must dedicate ourselves if we are ever to address the issues that Dr. King himself was on the cusp of addressing with a Poor People’s March on Washington at the time that James Earl Ray blew him off the second floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.

 

The question for you, therefore, after you have looked into the images of your face and your soul and given an accounting of your own activity or lack thereof, is the following:

 

What is your own role going to be in fulfilling the obligations articulated by Martin Luther King?

 

Has MLK become for you some kind of religious symbol that has no reality in your everyday lives?

 

Is MLK for you just a fossil in an archeological field under which you yourselves fail to delve to the next revealing level of the shameful depths of American history?

 

Or will you dedicate yourselves to becoming one of those identified in the following eloquent and accurate observation by Robert Kennedy, who himself was blown out of his own earthly sojourn by Sirhan Sirhan within two months of the slaying of Dr. King:

 

Each time a person stands for an ideal,

or seeks to improve the lot of others,

that person sends forth a tiny ripple

of hope.

 

And crossing each other from a million

different centers of energy and daring,

those ripples build a current that can

sweep down the mightiest walls of

oppression and resistance.

 

Moral courage is a rarer commodity

than bravery in battle or great

intelligence.

 

But it is one essential,

vital quality, for those who seek

to change a world that yields

most painfully to change.