Somebody Got to Have Some Sense on this Highway

No school today.

I reminded my students last week of this fact. They knew. It's the first week of classes and they know exactly how many holidays to expect. They're counting down already.

It's the federal holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, I said. We didn't always have this holiday, I told them, aware of the fact that for most of them, born this semester circa late 1980s, the holiday always had been. Do something, I said. And then, feeling very old, I added, when I was your age we used to march down to the South African Embassy and sit in and shut it down. You don't have to do that anymore, I added. Some on them smiled. The rest looked a little alarmed. Now that was a great excuse for missing class, I went on. (I couldn't stop myself.) You just told your teacher that you were in jail. I smiled. Widely.

Today at our home, we will read Faith Ringgold's wonderful "My Dream of Martin Luther King" with our little guy and listen to King's speeches on the radio.

This morning's New York Times gave us this holiday offering: Sarah Vowell's "Radical Love Gets a Holiday."

Here's some choice excerpts but you can click on the title above for the whole text. Go ahead. Click.

...Because I am a culturally Christian atheist the same way my atheist Reform friends are culturally Jewish, I look forward to Martin Luther King’s Birthday — when the news momentarily replaces the rants of the faith-based spitfires with clips of what an actually Christlike Christian sounds like — with the kind of fondness with which my pal Ben looks back on the decent, affectionate ideal that was his summer camp.

I have become just another citizen whose only religion is the freedom of religion and as such I patrol the wall of separation between church and state like some jumpy East German guarding Checkpoint Charlie back before Ronald Reagan single-handedly tore it down.

Which is why I am relieved that journalists and voters keep asking Mike Huckabee, the Republican presidential candidate, what he meant 10 years ago when he told a meeting of his fellow Baptists, “I hope we answer the alarm clock and take this nation back for Christ.” That is a curiously unconstitutional opinion for someone seeking the job of defending the Constitution, not to mention historically inaccurate considering the mostly deist founders were about as spiritual as the original cast of “Hair.”

But I am also relieved when Mr. Huckabee occasionally blurts out some Sunday School sentiment about how he doesn’t think a poor child should have to sleep in a car. Of course, this whiff of Jesus makes some of his fellow Republicans turn on him as if he’s Michael Dukakis. Because they fear that trying to find the homeless homes translates into raising the taxes they must render unto Caesar.Whoever wins the presidential election this year will be a Christian. (Unless of course it’s that one guy who is a member of a Muslim sleeper cell. Just when you think the electoral process couldn’t get any more stupid....) So the rest of us might as well suck it up and see if we can pick the Christian who is, if incapable of loving his or her enemies, the one who seems least likely to drum up a bunch of extra, new enemies to hate.

In this age of a slower, grubbier mutually assured destruction, when no one’s typed the word “nonviolence” since the typewriter, it’s worth reading Dr. King’s quarrel with the cold war’s MAD ploy. In the “loving your enemies” text he tells a pretty little parable about how one night his brother A. D. drove him to Tennessee. Infuriated by all the other cars’ brights, A. D. vowed to crank his lights and blind the next driver passing by. Dr. King told him not to, that it would just get everybody killed. “Somebody got to have some sense on this highway,” he said.