On the March

I couldn't help but feel sad thinking of today's fiftieth anniversary of the civil rights march on Washington for jobs and freedom.  Maybe that's because jobs and freedom are in such short supply half a century later. 

I doubt Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would be happy with the state of the Union, given everything that's going on in the states of the Union.  Oh, he'd be happy with a black president, but not much else.  Under the guise of "states' rights," numerous states are restricting voting rights, restaurants are asking black customers to kindly leave if a white customer feels "threatened," black teenagers can be gunned down in Florida for looking suspicious, and a white supremacist is trying to start an all-white town on the plains of North Dakota. We certainly have a form of American apartheid.  In Essex County, New Jersey, where I live, there are neighborhoods and whole towns that are entirely black, while my hometown looks like the sort lily-white place you'd see in a fifties sitcom.  

Whenever rights are described with an adjective, the adjective normally suggests pertinence to a demographic - hence, "equal rights" refers to women, "civil rights" refers to blacks, and so on.  But, as Dr. King noted in his famous "I Have a Dream" speech, the civil liberties of whites are inextricably linked to the the civil liberties of people of color.  Because civil rights are everyone's rights - the rights to live and breathe freely and contentedly.  At the time of Dr. King's assassination in 1968, he was going from beyond desegregating restaurants to pushing for more jobs for the poor.  In one sense, his dream of equality has come true in America.  Americans - black, white, Hispanic, Asian, indigenous - are all equally getting screwed by an economic order keeping them down and denying them the right to live comfortably for the work they do . . . if they can find work to do.  

And please, no more anniversary marches.  They're the political equivalent of limited-edition commemorative CD re-issues; they celebrate past achievements in a present time of lack of achievement.  The idea of a march, incidentally, has been debased by anti-tax rallies and marches for gun rights - not to mention the Jon Stewart / Stephen Colbert "Restore Sanity and/or Fear" rally of 2010.  So stop marching and get to work, and let's do something before the reactionary forces in America take over everything. :-(