Dr. King would have been huge on Twitter
Social media percolated reliably Monday with every depressing aspect of Martin Luther King Jr.’s life and death — how the FBI encouraged him to kill himself, how his polling was at 75% disapproval when he was gunned down on that balcony in Memphis, how celebrating MLK Day in the polarized 21st century somehow coincided with a massive gun rally in Virginia’s capital city.
This marked the 35th consecutive January that fractious parts of an ever-fracturing nation noted the life and passing of Dr. King, and as usual, there is nothing static about it. The loss is ever worse, the vanished wisdom ever more ruinous, the clarity and passion of his message ever more relevant.
What would he say about us in our current state? From the relevant texts, it’s not hard to fathom.
“On some positions,” reads his autobiography, “Cowardice asks the question, ‘Is it safe?’ Expediency asks the question, ‘Is it politic?’ And Vanity comes along and asks the question, ‘Is it popular?’ But Conscience asks the question, ‘Is it right?’ And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must do it because Conscience tells him it is right.”
Would that this were not archived eloquence but a guide for deliberation on the floor of the U.S. Senate in the coming weeks, but that’s about as likely to happen as any of 1,000 other things Dr. King foresaw and might have helped ameliorate in the nearly 52 years since his assassination.
Fewer and fewer people give a rip about language anymore, but Dr. King’s language, both written and spoken, elevated communication to a standard rarely matched for impact by the greatest communicators of the next half century. It was during his 75% disapproval period when he started talking about Vietnam in a forceful way. Though his “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered four years earlier, is often accepted as the greatest speech of the 20th century, his language on the morass of immorality that was U.S. policy in Southeast Asia was every bit as muscular and portentous.
“I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such,” went one such speech. “Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live in the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.”
You need not be reminded about who fights our wars today.
Such is the often disheartening elasticity of Dr. King’s vision. Perhaps it wasn’t that difficult for him to assume that America would never learn, but again, the clarity and prescience of his writing continues to outline our history.
“When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people,” he wrote, “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
Dr. King’s passing was hardly the end of American intellectualism, but as we’ve begun to measure his absence in decades, fewer of his intellectual equals seem to energize the audience, and some have become reluctant to speak in the public square at all, much less on the digital platforms that have all but supplanted American culture.
What a pity Dr. King did not survive to unsheathe his wit on Twitter. He’d have a billion followers.
“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity” would be a good @MLK tweet from his personal archives.
Better yet, “We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”
And, of course, this would be his first notification:
“Your and idiot.”