Pursuing King’s Justice

As we celebrate the birth and sacrificial contributions of Martin Luther King, Jr., again at the beginning of another year of trouble, and crisis, and controversy, it would be good to remember why this young man struggled so hard: to wake up our nation and our world to a better possiblility, “the bright sun of justice.” Scientific and technological changes had already made it possible during King’s lifetime for all people to live decent and dignified lives by sharing in the earth’s abundance. An ever more extensive communications revolution makes it even more clear now that all could share in education, civic decision making, and choosing the values that will guide our shared future.

King’s voice echoes down the long corridor of years: Let justice grounded in love be your guide to shaping that shared future. By love, King never meant sentimental gush. He meant empathy for others’ human situation, a sense that our lives are bound together in ways that make denying their needs and damaging their dignity a dangerous affront to all of us, and a conviction that humanity’s great gifts must not be wasted, but rather developed and shared.

The human need for meaningful, adequately compensated, contributive work for all who can and will do it is still a basic human need on which King’s love-guided pursuit of justice must lead us to fix our attention. The necessity of work is not some regrettable aspect of a social order that has not yet discovered ways to make full-time leisure possible for everyone. It is a deep part of who we are as human beings, how we develop our capabilities, where we test our various strengths and put them to use in the world. Thus, pursuing King’s justice now, in this time of continuing national and global recession, means seeking new ways to make socially and environmentally sustainable, fairly compensated, capabilities developing and personality expanding opportunities for work available to all, soon and for all the years to come.