What Would Dr.King Fight For?

Martin Luther King Jr.'s views have been reduced to such a level that the average high school student could not surmise what his political stances were beyond that he fought for civil rights and encouraged non-violent action. The holiday given in his honor has been a disgrace to his vision and has been used as an excuse to pacify the continuing struggle that he often described.

While he was heralded as a great civil rights activist, his greater calling is often ignored. King's vision extended beyond simply dreaming of black and white kids holding hands in harmony, indeed, they went much deeper into what King viewed as the systemic cause of such social injustice.

That systemic cause he saw was greed, militarism, and the stranglehold of a materialistic society ignoring the impoverished and downtrodden. Poverty, to King, was not simply a problem for poor ghetto bound blacks, it was a societal problem that had to be attacked by every American.

King said, "we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society." To him, materialism fueled inexorable injustice and that true empowerment of the poor came when we started compassionately giving them opportunity to rise up.

We are not there yet.

The question hangs on to us: what would Dr. King fight for today? What causes would he take up? Though we can't ask him directly we can look at what he has said in the past to gain inspiration for the new wave of social injustice taking hold under our very noses.

One can look at the current debate surrounding universal health care. A Harvard study says in 2001 56% of all bankruptcy in the US is caused by surmounting medical costs due to illness and injury. Out of them, 72% had health insurance and were working.

There is something very wrong when half of bankruptcies are caused by health care costs. There is something very wrong when the rhetoric is, "We don't want to care for the slacking poor." There is something wrong when the richest nation in the entire world says it can't afford to give health care to every single one of its citizens.