Remembering A King

Remembering A King

Hello my friends, another late missive for which I apologize. I was helping a friend move and had i attempted a blog post Monday it would have been something like; Me tired, nap now, zzzz.

And as amusing as that might have been it would have been quite unsatisfying I suspect.

So here I am.

This past Monday, the day this blog is SUPPOSED to go out on was Martin Luther King Jr day here in the U.S. It is a time where we honor the civil rights leader and talk about how far we’ve come, how far we’ve yet to go and how much of the man’s history is obscured or lionized by time. If you do not know the life and works of Dr. King I suggest you look him up. And if you do I really suggest you look him up because what you know is probably just the tip of the iceberg.

Now I do not feel myself equipped to really dele into Dr. King’s life, and I do not know I bring much to the conversation that is not better said by others so I will take a different tract and ponder this through the lens of a writer.

Oppression, and the struggle of the minority against that oppression is a human experience that dates back as far as we can determine. As such it should be no surprise that such stories are not just common, but quite popular. All of us posses some innate sense of justice, of write and wrong. All of us posses some level of blindness to our cultures’ flaws. These stories teach and awaken us, both in literal recollections such as George Takei’s “They Called Us Enemy” or Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s X-men.

Authors are somewhat divided on this. Some feel we should use allegory, like the X-men, to talk about these issues and teach people. Others feel that doing so diminishes the real harm and suffering of the minority groups that suffer around us in our very day.

I do not believe there is a right answer to this debate. I do not think it should be debated but I do know my answer to it.

I operate in the sphere of allegory and analogy. I prefer it because I find it is easier, oddly, for people to emphasize with a thing wildly different from themselves that is going through a hardship than something very near. I feel people will connect more strongly with the few traits that are the same if more of them are not and can better internalize the experience. Can better bring that understanding into their own lives and extrapolate out to the wider world.

Much as everyone loves but not every one loves the same so a character in love can touch us all even if they’re love is not our own.

Everyone has experienced injustice and seeing that similarity in characters different than us helps us see those injustices in people different than us.

As I said a few blogs ago I am not a Jew. But I did read the Diary of Ann Frank and Maus. I have never served in the military but I have read “I Marched with Patton”.

These things lend to me experiences that are not my own and enrich my life, open my awareness as a result. And I pray that I can in some small way pay back what I learned from things like The X-men, or Star Trek, by using those self same lessons to talk about our shared human experience of suffering and our shared human drive to make the world a better place.

I hope that everyday, whether it be fiction or fact you absorb tales of those different than you overcoming struggles so you can learn from them and see just how similar we all really are. We are all, after all, human.

Take care my dear readers and God bless;

~S. Wallace