The `Strength to Love'
THE BIRTHDAY of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is a national holiday because he spoke to all Americans, by word and example, about what it meant to be an American. Dr. King's message, finally, was not about race but justice, not about power but love.</br></br>Since Dr. King's death, the word love has not been much invoked in our political discourse, about race or anything else. It strikes the ear of 1993 as naive, a word that can't teach us much about either the causes or remedies of injustice. Politics is dominated by the language of power, social policy by numbers or ideology. Talk about race is accented by mistrust, anger and despair.</br></br>Dr. King understood all this, but fought it throughout his life. A preacher of the Gospel, he understood that his task was not simply to organize his friends but to convert his enemies. "The best way to assure oneself that love is disinterested," he said, "is to have love for the enemy neighbor from whom you expect no good in return, but only hostility and persecution."</br></br>In other hands, this might seem a recipe for resignation. On the contrary, Dr. King argued, only the strong could love. In his hands, love became a revolutionary concept that called into question the arrangements people accept on a day-to-day basis as "normal." "The hardhearted individual never sees people as people, but rather as mere objects or as impersonal cogs in an ever-turning wheel," he said in a sermon reprinted in his book "The Strength to Love." "In the vast wheel of industry, he sees men as hands. In the massive wheel of big city life, he sees men as digits in a multitude. In the deadly wheel of army life, he sees men as numbers in a regiment. He depersonalizes life."</br></br>With love as a prism, Dr. King saw his way to a devastating critique of racial oppression in this country - but also to a solution. He demonized no one, lost hope in no one. His immediate cause was civil rights for African Americans, but his goal was an America that lived up to its promises - promises he revered. His was "a dream deeply rooted in the American dream, that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal."