It's that time of year, folks. There was a call from the Washington Post this morning and a request from Minnesota Public Radio yesterday. The questions are almost always the same:"What would Dr. King say about ...?" Iraq? the Bush administration? the tsunami crisis? My sense is that it's not that anyone cares deeply about what King would say or that I have exclusive insight on what King would say. Given what I know, I can speculate that he would have been opposed to the invasion of Iraq, that he'd be a critic of Bush administration policies, and that he'd be in the forefront of efforts at relief for southeast Asia. But the man's been dead for 36 years now. Get used to it. The world is your responsibility now, not his.

As the years pass, I mourn the death of Martin Luther King less and less because I experience and mourn more and more deaths of our other comrades in the civil rights movement. Just this week alone, 91 year old Rosa Parks was found to be suffering from dementia and Jim Forman and Joanne Grant have died. Virtually everyone has some superficial sense of who Martin Luther King was. Many people have heard something about Mrs. Parks, but mention Jim's and Joanne's names and you'll get vague looks of non-recognition. Jim was the executive secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee from 1961 to 1966. Joanne began her career in 1959 as an assistant to W. E. B. Du Bois, published Black Protest in 1968, and was biographer and filmographer of Ella Baker. So, the questions about what would King say also bother me because those who gave substance to and occasionally challenged his leadership of the movement are passing from us, even as we give superficial deference to his influence.

This Martin Luther King holiday, I'll be mourning the deaths of Jim Forman and Joanne Grant and the fact that dear Mrs. Parks has slipped beyond us. This Martin Luther King holiday, I'll be asking those around me to read what Dr. King said and make the connections for themselves. If George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld dare pay tribute to his memory, my middle finger will fly up in righteous contempt for their meaningless gestures. As George said on Seinfeld:"I gotta tell you, I am loving this yada yada thing. I can gloss over my whole life story." The world is your responsibility now. The only thing I ask is that you not demean our movement by grotesque distortions of its promise.