Last Tuesday I woke up near 3 am with a terrible sore throat and just feeling like crap. I felt that way for a solid 6 days and today I woke up feeling like a burden had been lifted.
I was useless for most of the past week, looking around at the clutter in the house with no will or energy to clear it up. Today I got up and cleaned the house, my lungs are still a bit heavy, I'm still a bit tired, but I think the worst is over.
Today is a holiday in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. I don't feel qualified to say too much about him, to quote him, or act like I know what his fight was all about. I only know snippets, bits of info from movies and TV shows, a little bit from history class, quotes from people's Facebook posts. I don't feel qualified at all to talk about him, his life, his legacy.
All I know is that he was trying to fight injustice and that he was trying to make a better world for his children.
I know that one group of people subjugated another group and justified that by making the other group into a subcategory. This happens all over the world, it still happens.
People enslave others to benefit from their labor. They make others into this subcategory of "less than" to steal from them and subdue the guilt they might have felt for doing that to another human being.
It is easy to want to just say, "that was so long ago." Or to say "I didn't do that to others, I am not my ancestors." Maybe I could feel like that if the people who had been subjugated had been summarily restored to a livelihood back then. If they would have been treated with respect and invited into society as equals, I would think "let's leave all that in the past." But I know as well as everyone else that didn't happen.
That the people who had been held as property had to fight for their standing in society. Not only that but they are blamed when things get violent because "we should be able to just work things out peacefully."
We know that nothing will change if no one puts up a fuss, that's the way of the world. There's a concept I've heard of recently, that of getting into "good trouble." Fighting against oppression, racism, bigotry, hatred, and fighting for our survival in this world are all things to fight for.
For further reading and understanding, I'm going to read what he wrote.
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/publications/king-papers
https://thekingcenter.org/about-tkc/books-bibliography/
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