Zen and the Art of Sanitation Operants

On the night before his death, Martin Luther King, Jr., was in Memphis, Tennessee, speaking in support of an ongoing garbage collectors’ strike that had taken the city to the brink of chaos.

Two African American men, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, had been mangled and killed by a malfunctioning compactor two months earlier, and city officials, especially recently-elected Memphis mayor Henry Loeb, had been purposefully reluctant to address issues of job safety, or of hourly wages so low most sanitation workers were forced to go on welfare.

As the current Wikipedia entry does such a poor job of capturing either the spirit or the essence of this sermon, I strongly encourage interested readers to check out the audio or transcript in full, for example, at 
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkivebeentothemountaintop.htm
(copy and paste in your browser window)

By 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., had reached the height of his oratorical skill and power.  Injustice and the unbreakable force of individuals acting together were all subjects he had addressed before, so portions of the speech are so familiar and so tuned to common neural pleasure centers, glossing this speech is like hearing a favorite song while relaxing in a favorite chair.  The particulars were still fresh enough, though, to force King at one point to turn offstage for details (“What is the other bread company?  Tell them not to buy Hart's bread.”), to make him, in other words, appear human.

For whites reading the speech, the moment of absolution, of being forgiven for thrice denial, comes near the end, when King recounts being stabbed with a letter opener a decade earlier, the tip resting so close to his aorta that any sudden, violent movement would have punctured the vessel, causing complete exsanguination.  He recounts receiving "Get Well" telegrams and letters from all over the world, from every important head of state (none of which, significantly, he could recall the contents of), instead having committed to memory a note received from a ninth grader attending White Plains High School, quoting it in full:

"Dear Dr. King.  I am a ninth-grade student at the White Plains High School.  While it should not matter, I would like to mention that I am a white girl.  I read in the paper of your misfortune, and of your suffering.  And I read that if you had sneezed, you would have died.  And I'm simply writing to say that I’m so happy that you didn’t sneeze." 

The future of humankind so depends on this letter's existence, on this individual's existence, despite the most likely candidate, a student hailing from White Plains, New York, being unable to attend a high school that included ninth graders at the time the letter was written. 

Do you believe?  Because it is essential, indeed, the very future of white civilization depends upon, not a red wheelbarrow, but of this young girl being more than King’s rhetorical creation, an artificial construct Caucasians must subsume in order to gain entrance to Heaven. 

It is all too perfect:  She had to be young, she had to be a girl, she had to be white.   She had to be without sin, essentially, immaculately conceived, adjacent manger.  In 1958, did such an individual exist?  Could such an individual exist? 

The following evening, James Earl Ray’s bullet found its mark.  There were people in Memphis that night, there are still people throughout the United States today, who were so thankful, at the moment of reckoning, NOW pulling the trigger, James Earl Ray didn't sneeze.  Milliseconds later, God didn’t bless Martin Luther King, Jr. with any miraculous avoidance rescue either, so what do you do?  Stop believing?  Consign yourself to spending the rest of your days railing dully against fate? 

Tomorrow, at long last, our local newspaper has promised an article (not a letter, not a mention in an editorial) addressing race-restrictive covenants in Estes Park.  I’m intrigued to see where it appears, and what size of headline it merits.   Actually, I’m intrigued to see if it even makes tomorrow’s edition, since another matter of broader local interest has surfaced in the interim, and the reporter assigned to cover both this and that has detective work of his own to pursue.

No matter.  I’ve already traveled to Denver and Colorado Springs, to make sure the story was set in type for future generations.  If not tomorrow, hopefully sometime before I die. 

Yet even before the “legitimate sheen” accorded by local publicity, voices louder than mine rally in opposition.  No distracting name appears anywhere to taint the message, but the message is, sadly, at this point, distinctively solo.  Oh, it’s just the constant complainer again, complaining.  Never stops never stopping. 

Injustice is swift, implemented unthinkingly, in lieu of discussion.  Removal of injustice is slow.  The sanitation strike and the protests surrounding it were not without violence, despite King’s calls for nonviolence.  We are imperfect creatures, not programmable machines – Hundreds of thousands of years distant from evolving into self-correcting organisms. 

Our bodies deteriorate.  Our noses bleed, occasionally spontaneously and without obvious cause.  Our strength fails, to the point where we have to yield the job of designated screw-top lid opener.  Near the end, our lungs fill with fluid, drown us in our own waste.   

And, yes, occasionally, the unwashed masses lose patience over injustice, tired of being stepped on and pushed around by corrupt white males, that seemingly never-ending stream of aging dictators and idiots who somehow always end up in control.

But Mahatma Gandhi, another prophet called home by an assassin’s bullet, was right.  The sun rises, the snake swallows its tail, the wheels on the bus go round and round.  Life is so very predictable. 

Change must spring from ignorance, from initially ignoring agents of change…