Martin Luther King Jr. Day
Posted by Joshua Claybourn on 16 January 2006 | 31 responses
Here in the States it’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day. While it’s partially set aside to remember Michael King, better known as Martin Luther King, Jr., the main point of the day is to remember all that he stood for.
Anytime I watch the “I Have a Dream” speech, it sends shivers up my spine. What a powerful, truthful and well-delivered message. If you have the capabilities, watch this 10 minute, 17 second Real Video clip of Rev. King, Jr. on the steps of Lincoln Memorial giving his famous speech.
Of course King isn’t perfect. In recent years it’s come to light that King plagiarized much of his scholarly and civil rights work. But King’s message should not be overshadowed.
We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. . .
. . . I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive. . .
. . . When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”
31 Responses to “Martin Luther King Jr. Day”
I appreciate the tribute to King.
I think a better way to introduce him, however, is “Martin Luther King, Jr., born Michael L. King, Jr.” I haven’t seen a copy of the birth certificate but many sources list the certificate name as “Michael L. King, Jr.” His father was quoted as saying the doctor made a mistake because King Sr. was himself known as Michael, but his intention was to name his son after himself using his formal name.
The greater point to me, though is the relevancy at all. One of my grandmothers was born as Ida Amanda, but all her adult life she seemed to be known as Edith Amanda. Our family made no reference to her birth name in her newspaper obituary or church funeral service program and her tombstone lists only “Edith.” She never legally changed her name, though. No one in our family would ever refer to her as “Ida Amanda, better known as Edith Amanda”, because to us her name wasn’t Ida.
no one is free when there are those in the world that are oppressed.
This is not a criticism of you Josh, but a general observation.
Why does it matter whether or not he plagarized his disseration, or sections of his speeches? I can’t help but wonder why people feel compelled to bring this up when talking about his career, as if cribbing someone’s notes diminishes his overall achievements. Are we still uncomfortable with some of his criticisms of modern life?
I feel the same about people who bring up Abraham Lincoln’s views on race ad nauseum. It’s as if the ending of slavery is somehow diminished because Honest Abe wasn’t exactly Bobby Kennedy on race.
I think it’s certainly a legitimate point.
Of course it’s relevant – you know the outcry that would arise if it was established that others in the public eye stole writing and passed it off as their own.
And it’s not the same as Lincoln on race – that’s a crock. Everyone, particularly including a minister, knows or should know that stealing is wrong. There used to be a significant chunk of society who (wrongly) believed that slavery was right, and Lincoln took the first step in changing that opinion. Criticizing someone for not making it to the end of the course is just poor logic.
[BTW - isn't it still slavery when you are forced into work to pay your debts?????]
[BTW - isn't it still slavery when you are forced into work to pay your debts?????]
No.
“Lincoln took the first step in changing that opinion”
Um, no. Not even close. Not even by a long shot….
Paul is right, and A.A.’s assertion that Lincoln was the pioneer of anti-slavery encapsulates what’s wrong with the public’s understanding of slavery. Forget everything you learned by watching Roots.
Here’s an example. In 1832, the Virginia house of delegates voted on a proposal to end slavery. It failed, but by a vote of 73-58. The slavery debate was raging throughout the republic long before 1861, but economic forces kept it alive long enough for Lincoln to get the credit for thinking to end it.
I was thinking, principally, of William Wilberforce. But if we’re going to literally wonder who the first person was to think about ending slavery (of African-Americans, to be more precise), the answer is “probably a slave.”
It’s still a crock to call Lincoln a racist, whether he took the first step or the last step. It’s just another example of revisionist historians trying to placate people instead of just letting history teach its own lessons.
My grandfather’s family owned slaves back when it was legal and they treated the people so well, when they were emancipated, they kept my grandfather’s family name. They weren’t the ones who sold their own people to strangers – so, let’s make sure we get ALL of the facts right if we’re going to be so bloody concerned about accuracy!
And while we’re on the subject of slavery and Dr. King’s memorial day anyway, you should read Leonard Pitts, Jr.’s column from Monday:
“But the man who said, “I have a dream,” also said, “All life is interrelated,” and came to believe his mission as a moral leader encompassed more than race. Encompassed, among other things, class.
It is instructive to remember that in his last days, King was planning what he called the Poor People’s Campaign, a multiethnic march on Washington to demand action against poverty. “At Canaan’s Edge,” the final chapter of Taylor Branch’s epic retelling of the civil rights years, recounts a summit meeting a few weeks before King’s assassination. Chicano farmworkers, American Indians from the Plains and white coal miners from Appalachia sat with King to explore the revolutionary idea that their peoples might have causes and grievances in common.
Then King went to Memphis. And the idea has not been meaningfully explored since.
Neglect has made it no less tantalizing.
Yes, race matters. Most of us know this. But the genius of Martin Luther King in his final days was to understand that there are paradigms beyond race and that they matter, too.
So on Monday, as we are exhorted to seek paths of racial amity, one hopes we will also be exhorted to understand, as King did, that conscience has no color, that race is not destiny, that injustice anywhere threatens justice everywhere.
There are among us children who sleep in hunger, rise in cold, live in ignorance, and they are of every color and every tribe. We ought not find their suffering easier to accept because they are not like us. Ought to realize that the dignity of all is the concern of all.
That, too, was Martin’s dream.”
So, excuse me if I go back to my earlier comment that forced labor to pay bills is a form of slavery. It’s not such a stupid idea.
“Forced labor” means that somebody has a gun–or, rather, a whip–to your head; “paying bills” means that somebody has, at worst, a lien on your house. Slavery is an involuntary condition only alterable by one party, the party least likely to alter it; debts are contracts are voluntarily entered into by both parties, and can be renegotiated or terminated by either side (on the debtor’s side, by filing bankruptcy, paying off the debt, or by giving up the collateral).
So, no, there really is no comparison–unless one believes that debtors, as a class, have been tricked into their condition, and that they are unable to alter it through hard work, budgeting, or other legal recourses. And, incidentally, that as a condition of their status as debtors, their personal freedoms–not just to vote, but to speak, move, and act freely–have been, not modestly curtailed as a consequence of having less money than previously, but utterly denied.
As glad as I am to see someone urge a discussion of class in America, this is not the way to do it.
(And, given Lincoln’s views that blacks were inherently inferior in many respect to whites, calling him a racist is, in some unfortunate respects, simply accurate, even if the term connotes something quite different socially and substantively today.)
“debts are contracts are voluntarily entered into by both parties, and can be renegotiated or terminated by either side (on the debtor’s side, by filing bankruptcy, paying off the debt, or by giving up the collateral).”
You haven’t read the new BAPCPA, have you. There are debts that are non-dischargeable, which means that until you pay them off or die, you are responsible. The only difference is that you can’t be imprisoned for not paying them, but you certainly can’t enjoy any real freedom.
And as far as “debtors, as a class, [being] tricked into their condition, and that they are unable to alter it through hard work, budgeting, or other legal recourses,” A) where is the parallel in Africans selling their own tribe members into slavery; and, B) have you heard of FICO and penalty/default interest?
“As glad as I am to see someone urge a discussion of class in America, this is not the way to do it.”
Too bad Dr. King would differ with you on that.
If you took the run-of-the-mill 25-year-old with $12k (or whatever) in consumer debt (plus an auto loan) and you told Dr. King that she was a slave just like his ancestors….he might be offended. Justifiably.
Nor is having a low FICO score a categorical injustice, like slavery. (I mean, duh.) And the existence of nondischargeable debts doesn’t alter the voluntary nature of such debt–no, you can’t discharge your student loans, but, yes, you had a choice to accept them. (Your comments about “real freedom” border on the ludicrous–yes, except for the protection of your political and economic rights, you’ve been deprived just like Kunta Kinte.)
Sometimes people say wrong things that are either interesting despite, or even in virtue of, their wrongness; or potentially dangerous in that others may not recognize their wrongness. Such mistakes are often worthwhile to take the time to correct.
But sometimes people say wrong things that reveal nothing but their own incorrigible doltishness. And my advice to you, Paul, is not to waste your time on such cases.
I keep thinking that maybe, just maybe, repetition really is the mother of learning…..
“It is instructive to remember that in his last days, King was planning what he called the Poor People’s Campaign, a multiethnic march on Washington to demand action against poverty. “At Canaan’s Edge,” the final chapter of Taylor Branch’s epic retelling of the civil rights years, recounts a summit meeting a few weeks before King’s assassination. Chicano farmworkers, American Indians from the Plains and white coal miners from Appalachia sat with King to explore the revolutionary idea that their peoples might have causes and grievances in common.”
Phil, if you want to cast those comments as “wrong things that reveal nothing but … incorrigible doltishness,” then I suppose you’ve just demonstrated one who has become so open-minded that his brain fell out. You would do well to remember the old adage: It is better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.
I don’t have a problem casting my lot with Dr. King on this one, no matter what the terminally politically correct might think.
I have two questions for lawyerchik1:
Are you “Another Anonymous”? You wrote something about going back to an earlier statement of yours that “forced labor to pay bills” is like slavery, but the only earlier comment of that kind that I see was made by “Another Anonymous.” Also, you use some of the same language (specifically, “crock”).
Second, you have indicated that King agrees with you that “forced labor to pay bills” is slavery, but the passages from Pitts column demonstrate only King’s belief that poor people have grievances against someone (probably the government, since he intended to accomplish something by another march on Washington), not that he believed that their condition was slavery. Since you are hanging your argument on his authority, can you point to something where King agreed with the claim that you are making (though if you find it in a speech, it would be a good idea to make sure that he intended to argue seriously that debt is a form of slavery, and that he was not making the comparison for dramatic/rhetorical reasons). Of course, it wouldn’t be true just because he said it, but I wonder whether your comments refer to something that you did not post.
As to the “Another Anonymous” question: Busted for agreeing with the sentiment. Oh no. You got me.
On the rest of it: the point was poverty was as detrimental to society as a whole as the deleterious effects of inequality based on race. My extrapolation on the issue of debt came both from my reading of the source quoted (Leonard Pitts, Jr.’s 1/16/06 column) as well as my experience as a creditor’s lawyer dealing with bankruptcy issues.
Poverty arises not only from not having resources in the first place but also from overindebtedness – if you want to argue whether choice plays a role (which is essentially that debtors deserve what they get), I would agree that there is an initial amount of choice in the matter just as there was an initial choice on the part of the first slaves’ families and/or neighbors to sell them to strangers who took them to the new world. Initial choice is not necessarily choice as to all of the consequences – to the extent that the rules are changed after the choice is made, then I would find it difficult to conclude that the debtor should bear all of the consequences for the result, which is in part what is happening with credit card companies having to be compelled to raise minimum payments so that debtors have some glimmer of getting out of debt in their own lifetimes. As I said earlier, read the BAPCPA – then get back to me on whether debt isn’t a modern form of slavery.
Here’s another viewpoint/perspective:
“If you get a huge increase in the population and a lot of people are being pushed into economic vulnerability, both of which have happened in the Third World, you’ve got lots of people who are very poor and easily manipulated,” says Kevin Bales, a lecturer at the Roehampton Institute in Surrey, England, and author of Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy. “The police don’t protect them and you can enslave them. That’s exactly what’s happening in India and Pakistan and Thailand and Brazil and a lot of places around the world.”
***
Bales adds that it’s not necessary to remove people from their country of origin in order to deny them their rights. Anti-Slavery International is currently campaigning against debt bondage in India. Though it’s against the law, the group estimates that more than 10 million people remain bonded laborers — a situation that, Bales says, is the equivalent of enslavement.
“A lot of people misunderstand debt bondage to mean that somebody borrows some money and then they work as a way of repaying the money. But that’s not the way it works,” he says. “Your work doesn’t repay the money. You and your work are just the collateral. The person you borrow from basically owns you and all your work until you repay them.”
Copied from “Getting It: Modern Slavery”, http://www.gettingit.com/article/466
I would take a few issues with those two comments (not including the fact that I cannot tell whether you are admitting that you were “Another Anonymous” or stating that you simply agreed with him/her; if you are “Another Anonymous, it is nothing to be embarassed about — I was just curious, because you used the same language, and because you appeared to refer to AA’s comment as your own).
First, the “initial choice” of people who sold people they knew into slavery is nothing like the initial choice to assume debt in exchange for money. The initial choice to incur debt in exchange for money makes that transaction voluntary for the debtor, the person on whom the obligation is to be placed, while the initial choice to sell someone else into slavery only makes that transaction voluntary for the seller, not for the slave. (Also, you say that a debtor’s initial choice is not a choice of all of the consequences, which is true in principle, but I do not see how it could not be said to cover all of the consequences that the debtor could or should have been able to anticipate, or the terms of whatever kind of contract they signed.)
Second, I strongly suspect that we are using different definitions of “slavery.” You are indicating that the evidence that debt is a form of slavery is in the BAPCPA, but I do not see it in there. Instead of applying different standards to the same examples and coming to predictably different conclusions, I would be interested in reading what facts you believe would be necessary and sufficient to qualify something as slavery, or what would be the broadest definition of slavery that you would consider to be accurate.
Third, without knowing more about the specifics of the situations of the bonded laborers in India and of the people discussed by Bales, I could not say for sure whether they are truly slaves, but assuming that they are, I wonder how (or whether) you intended that to relate to debt more generally, or in the United States. It is possible for an arrangement to exist in the world in which slavery really is the consequence of debt, but that does not have a lot to do with the BAPCPA, or with “Chicano farmworkers, American Indians from the Plains and white coal miners from Appalachia.”
The point was that, before his death, King was moving in a direction toward recognition of the limits of class (not as in “you have no class”), rather than race, as the defining limitation in mobility and freedom. The questions you raise are points on a continuum.
As for the BAPCPA, the effect of the new bankruptcy law is not only to prevent abuses but in the process to further limit even legitimate reasons for discharge of debts. It represents the further erosion of opportunity for those who aren’t part of the appropriate class, and I see them as related concepts.
However affective class is (and it is less so in the United States than in the United Kingdom or India, although sadly more so in the States than in Sweden), race remains an independent, and powerful, variable.
Or, as Chris Rock said, “There isn’t a single white person in this audience who would be
willing to trade places with me, and I’m RICH.”
I echo Karl’s calls for you to define better what you mean by “slavery.” You consistently refuse to define your terms or state your premises, which allows you the rhetorical–but not the substantive–freedom to shift positions rather blithely. As Karl astutely notes, debt may be a precondition to slavery in certain situations, but that does not make debt in se equivalent to slavery. And although heavy debt unmercifully enforced may be de facto slavery, here we are talking about sharecroppers or serfs, and less frequently about the bourgeoisie. (There yet remains a massive distinction between a low FICO store, which may in fact be a just consequence of past actions, and being in hock to the gombeen man without any recourse.)
Further, the definition of debt slavery you’ve offered here:
“Your work doesn’t repay the money. You and your work are just the collateral. The person you borrow from basically owns you and all your work until you repay them.”
is, in fact, not far off from a Marxist interpretation of the relatinonship between Capital and Labor. I have long maintained that certain insights of Marxism should not be discarded, but I am surprised to see such a radical argument coming from such a–to use another Marxist term–reactionary interlocutor. But, of course, if you’re up for a discussion of the proletarianization of the workforce in post-industrial societies or of the alienation from work inherent in all post-agrarian cultures, I’m game.
“I echo Karl’s calls for you to define better what you mean by ’slavery.’”
Or what? You won’t play with me anymore?
Look, you don’t have to agree with me. It’s not my job to convince you of anything. I’ve explained all I’m going to explain about it, and you can choose to agree, disagree, pick apart, pick your nose, whatever. My point was clear to anyone who was really interested in at least getting where it came from, and you’re pushing for a treatise on the subject which a) is not what this forum is for, and b) is more than you push for from people you agree with (or even mildly disagree with but aren’t in a snit about).
It’s a big sandbox, Paul. Deal with it.
I was hoping someone else would respond to lc’s completely inaccurate characterization of Paul, but I guess I’ll have to briefly break my don’t-respond-to-the-dimwit policy. As someone who has very frequently disagreed with Paul, I can attest that he’s uniformly demanding on all his interlocutors; it’s just that usually the people he makes such demands on have at least some basic amount of competence in responding to such demands. (I might also note that Karl was making these demands on lc no less than Paul.)
The main penalty for not meeting such simple demands of dialectical responsibility is not getting thrown out of the sandbox, since we’re not talking about mere play (for which there may be no standards of rightness and wrongness) but rather rational discourse (for which there is an important difference between doing it well, doing it badly, and indeed not even making it to the level of doing it at all). The penalty, rather, is that such failure reveals the interlocutor in question to be incompetent as an interlocutor, and demonstrates that generally arguing with them would be, in Aristotle’s phrase, “like disputing with a vegetable” (Metaphysics, Gamma IV).
“The penalty, rather, is that such failure reveals the interlocutor in question to be incompetent as an interlocutor, and demonstrates that generally arguing with them would be, in Aristotle’s phrase, “like disputing with a vegetable” (Metaphysics, Gamma IV).”
Or, rather, that despite efforts to answer the repeated demands of people who refuse to simply discuss without having to “win”, the subject simply does not have the time to conclude – be careful how you characterize someone you don’t know enough about to do so knowledgeably. And before you back up to previous discussions, I will tell you: you don’t have enough information to make that assessment, tomato.
To throw out another reference to Greek philosophy, I have to say that lc reminds me a lot of Euthyphro.
Awwww – aren’t you sweet! “Logically exhaustive” is one of my favorites!!
On a more serious note, I appreciate and understand where you’re coming from in further prompts for answers – I have learned a great deal from the other posters as well as the questions directed at me in response to my own posts, and I am grateful for the push those questions creates to dig deeper.
It has created a bit of a dilemma, though, because I’m not a “serious blogger” – I read, catch the ideas, and can type fast enough to do what I’ve been doing, but I just don’t have the time some of you have to distill things as readily. To quote a much more experienced writer, I apologize for writing so much, but I didn’t have time to write less.
By the same token, from my review, most of those with, as you put it, “at least some basic amount of competence in responding to such demands” are more often than not individuals who either agree with your position or whom you (for whatever reason) don’t want to piss off. Just an observation before I go home.
I only ask for a definition because that is almost certainly what this disagreement is about, and any examination of concrete examples will be pointless until we address the disagreement over the definition, because otherwise, we won’t even be talking (or writing) about the same thing. It would also make it clearer what it is that we are discussing — it looks like we have gone from discussing whether the need to work to repay debts is a form of slavery to discussing whether class is a limit on mobility and “freedom.” I guess I may be running from the sandbox by insisting on this, but like you said, posting multiple comments in a discussion like this can take up time, and I think I would be wasting that time if I were willing to continue without making sure that I know what we are talking about. Before, I just thought that we disagreed over the definition of slavery, but now, I don’t even know whether we agree that we are talking about slavery.
I appreciate your clarification, Karl, and I’m really not trying to run from the question. I guess the way I would explain it is like this: just as our understanding of technology has changed drastically over the last 150-200 years, so slavery has changed. That makes a difference because in the “Roots” era that most people think of when they think of slavery, transportation and mobility were not as advanced as they are now – class and mobility have affected certain restrictions that used to exist on the ability of slaves to move or travel to locations where they could establish new lives as free people.
It’s not that working to repay any measly debt is slavery; it’s that a life characterized by debt is slavery to creditors. It’s a difference of degree, and while you say that the concepts of slavery and debt repayment and those of class and mobility seem to be unrelated, from what I’ve read about both, they have common roots.
Slavery at its inception was the ownership of human beings as chattel, yes, but the purpose behind it was cheap and expendable (or fungible) labor. The reason a market existed for slaves in the first place was because richer individuals and families needed labor to work fields and maintain real property in a primarily agricultural society. It was, at its foundation, a labor/market issue.
Property owners could not maintain their holdings alone; they could not maintain their wealth if they had to pay for the labor, plus there did not seem to be an available pool of laborers to reliably and consistently perform the work; and, they had little control over free workers beyond pay: if they did not pay (either at all or enough), the workers would leave.
Aside from the labor market issue, the source of slaves historically was not just those who were sold by their own to others for profit, whether by trick or just by outright sale, but also by indenture and debt. If, for example, you owed someone more than you could repay them on demand, you could be compelled to work for that individual until your debt was paid. You could run away, of course, and leave your possessions and former life behind, which people did. If the slaveholder wanted you back, he would have to leave his land and track you down, and that cost money and productivity.
The reason blacks became the “slaves of choice” was in large part because they could be identified on sight. From that perspective, anyone seeing a black person without the expected master would know that this individual did not belong where he or she was, they could be arrested and punished or sold or returned or whatever, but that preference did not restrict the condition of slavehood to just blacks, nor was the practice of buying and selling individuals (indentured servants, children of ones servants, etc.) limited to black people.
Translating that economic situation to modern life, including the technology and other labor/market conditions, and it makes sense to discuss debt and restricted class mobility in the same terms: modern slavery. Just because there continue to be those who are bodily sold and beaten and whipped or whatever does not mean that those who are enslaved by their debt are not also slaves.
The issue makes more sense when you look at credit scoring and assessment of interest by credit card companies, banks, etc., by use of the FICO score. Going back to the Bible for a minute, the Jews were instructed by God that if they loaned money to a poor person, they were not to charge interest so that they could give the person an opportunity to get back on his feet and return to productive society.
In modern times, those who can least afford to borrow must pay the highest interest on the same amount. If “Ralph” has a FICO score of 780 and “Marty” has a FICO score of 540, and both wish to borrow $1000 from the same bank, “Ralph” will pay (over time) less for the same money than “Marty” because of the allocation of risk. The more you owe, the more you pay, the less you can save, and therefore the less wealth you can accumulate to accomplish what people consider to be appropriate goals: owning a home, owning a car, buying food or clothing, etc.
Where this dovetails into class and mobility is in the presumption that everyone starts from the same point. In my conversations with people about debt and bondage, those with the least understanding of the relationship generally – I say “generally”, but not always – have not had significant money problems. They have “generally” had all of their needs met; they have “generally” never had to decide between paying rent or buying food; as adults, they have “generally” had a credit score of not less than 750.
That position completely ignores the reality that there are significant numbers of individuals, of all races, who have never lived like that – who have never had any money to manage, let alone learn to manage in a situation in which consequences for their mistakes are minimized, such as occurs when a child has an allowance and learns to manage his resources. And I’m not just talking about ghettos or poverty-level households; I’m talking about what we would ordinarily expect to be normal, middle-class homes in which there is no real education about managing money.
These are people who are enslaved – voluntarily, yes, but enslaved nonetheless – to their debt when they have a mortgage that requires at least 2 incomes, car payments (and insurance payments – because we have to have insurance), credit card debt for which the interest rate can double with no warning, and educational and other debt that is no longer dischargeable in bankruptcy even if the individual realized that he was in over his head.
What happens to the children in such households? They grow up thinking that debt is the way life is. They learn the same patterns their parents had. They continue the cycle of spending more than they make and making only minimum payments. Ultimately, they learn to live in fear of the telephone and the mail and they cannot enjoy real mobility because if they are lucky enough to get a good job, they don’t dare leave it because the house of cards they’ve been living with will fall. And afterward, where can they really go that the mess won’t go with them? Negative information stays on your credit report for at least 6-10 years, depending on what it is.
We might say that you pick up and start over again, but do people in those situations have that perspective? And starting over again, with more and more employers and landlords relying on FICO scores as part of their hiring or renting criteria, will be an uphill battle. Do people do it? Yes, but it takes tremendous effort and hope and help from others, and that’s my point in this discussion: to point out that there are still people in this country who are not free. Are we ever going to have a nation of completely free people? No. Does it mean that we shouldn’t try to make things better for our individual communities? No. It’s just that there is a widening class gap that, as I read history, seems headed for the same place: one in which significant numbers of people will have little or no control over their own destinies, and that bothers me.
I don’t see that people in this country, or possibly elsewhere in the world (except Ireland – that’s a topic for a different day), have the ability to create wealth or control their own destinies in any meaningful way. I don’t see that wealth is really being created in this country any longer: people exchange wealth and redistribute it, perhaps, but so much of our economy is based on credit that the number of people who own a home, for example, is greatly out-weighed by those who own a mortgage and often even at least one home equity loan or line of credit. It’s possible, and I know it’s being done, but it’s not the majority any longer, and it’s sad.
Perhaps my characterization is based on my observations of desperate people in desperate situations, but I fail to see how the type of situation I’ve described is any less labor/market driven slavery than what started back in the 1700s-1800s. From what I read of Dr. King’s speeches before his assassination, as well as subsequent discussions about the direction he was headed, I just don’t see them as distinct and unrelated concepts.
We need some major shifts in this country – economically, morally, socially, and in other areas. To be clear, I don’t for one second think that the government needs to assume this responsibility: we’ve all seen what happens when the government gets involved in things, and their involvement would only make it worse. I admit: I don’t know the answers. I do know that if the questions aren’t asked more often, no one will bother to figure them out, and I don’t want to just sit back and watch that happen.