Invoking the Spirit of Martin Luther King

On this day we honor a man who had a great dream.  His dream was for all of us to have the same rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  On this day, we need his spirit to come alive again; to remind us of that dream.  This video report with excerpts from Mr. King’s speeches, illustrates quite clearly our current situation.

Some of the stories remind me of an observation I made some years ago.  About 9 years ago, I worked for a corporation’s call center (setting up repair appointments for customers).  When I first started, the corporation had a weekly tradition of buying bagels for all the employees on Fridays.  After I had been there for some months, we had a staff meeting where it was announced that we had just had the “most profitable quarter ever“.  The following week, at another meeting, we were told that it was too expensive for the company to buy us bagels and would therefore discontinue the practice.  I know, bagels are such a small thing.  For me, it was not the bagel.  For me, the point was that they told us we had just helped them make more money than ever before and now they could not afford the small morale booster of a weekly bagel.

It is the way of cooking a frog to do it in small degrees at a time…Chip away at benefits…slowly raise the deductions for health care…slowly integrate two worker’s jobs into one worker’s job…they really don’t need us anymore.