Yesterday was Martin Luther King Jr. day, the national Federal holiday for marking the birthday of Dr. King.  I was in high school, in the South when Dr. King was in the news.  King was organizing, raising to consciousness the formal and informal practices by which we whites were relegating black citizens to second class, marginal participants in democracy.   Worse we profited, derived value from unjust, unfair, impoverishing practices in housing, in labor, and in education.  A great deal has changed since those years.

There’s a memorial statue honoring Dr. King in Washington DC.

Last night while watching a NFL Rams and 49rs playoff game on television, some perfunctory comments were made at the end of the game about Dr. King.  As usual, we honor the dead, and fail to mention a rising movement to negate, to rollback all that Dr. King, and all that those who came after, accomplished.  I would have felt heartened if the announcers has raised a note of alarm at the refusal of the Republican party and two conservative Democrats to support voting rights.  I realize NFL announcers are not paid to speak the truth.

The Senate pushes ahead today with debate on the bill.

Much has changed since Dr. King was alive.  My mind stutters to consider how different the world has become since King died in April of 1968.  Much has remained though, — the residue of past purposes, and deeds.

It is instructive to read what one Canadian, Thomas Homer-Dixon wrote about their neighbor to the south.

These factors were were listed, “baked in” from the founding of our country:

• Distrust in government tracing back to the political culture of the Revolution
• Slavery
• The Electoral College, a compromise spawned by slavery
• Overrepresentation of rural voting power in the Senate
• Failure of Reconstruction after the Civil War

Legacy features are compounded by the multiplying effect of contemporary flaws in our republic.

• Stagnating middle-class incomes
• Chronic economic insecurity
• Inequality in an economy transformed by technology and globalization
• Returns to labor stagnate while returns to capital soar

And these lines are worth quoting:

Inflation-adjusted wages for the median male worker in the fourth quarter of 2019 (prior to the infusion of economic support owing to the COVID-19 pandemic) were lower than in 1979; meanwhile, between 1978 and 2016, CEO incomes in the biggest companies rose from 30 times that of the average worker to 271 times. Economic insecurity is widespread in broad swaths of the country’s interior, while growth is increasingly concentrated in a dozen or so metropolitan centres.

If you’d like to read the entire article published by The Globe And Mail CLICK HERE.

For background on Thomas Homer-Dixon CLICK HERE.