Curtin provides a fitting remembrance of MLK on this special day which is ignored by most American businesses. He begins his article with this profound insight:
As Martin Luther King’s birthday is celebrated with a national holiday, his death day disappears down the memory hole. Across the country – in response to the King Holiday and Service Act passed by Congress and signed by Bill Clinton in 1994 – people will be encouraged to make the day one of service. Such service does not include King’s commitment to protest a decadent system of racial and economic injustice or non-violently resist the U.S. warfare state that he called “the greatest purveyor of violence on earth.”I think a MLK Day of Truth would be too much for most Americans, who have been raised on patriotic myths, to handle. It would mean that most Americans would be required to reconcile these myths with the reality that we live under a psychopathic criminal gang of liars, thieves, and murderers. So, let us not fantasize about days of truth, because there won't be any. Let us, that is, those of us who unflinchingly can face the truth, plan and organize to rid ourselves of this nightmarish capitalist scourge upon the planet and its humans.
Government sponsored service is cultural neo-liberalism at its finest, the promotion of individualism at the expense of a mass movement for radical institutional change.
“Nothing in all the world is more dangerous,” warned Dr. King, “than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
