The Discerning Texan
All that is necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.
-- Edmund Burke
-- Edmund Burke
Monday, January 17, 2005
Dr. King
Today's Wall Street Journal had a very moving column about the impact of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on an immigrant who thought herself an enemy of America. We'll get to that in a minute. But I had to come clean about my own gradual matriculation from a skeptic from the other side of the political spectrum to reverent admiration for a man whose words truly embodied not only a cry for freedom for a long-oppressed people, but indeed the same lust for freedom that men like Franklin and Jefferson and Hamilton felt hundreds of years before him. And he did it without impugning his enemies or casting stones, as do his modern day "successors" in the civil right movement.
There is a tendency in this country, especially among whites, and particularly in Southern cities like Houston, to associate Dr. King with the same current-day activists who followed King's legacy, and to believe that there was little difference between he and present day "civil rights" extortionists who besmirch Dr. King and everything he stood for by their very association with him. I'm talking about the Sharptons and the Jacksons and the Cynthia McKinneys. And I did a great disservice to Dr. King in ever thinking that, because today's activists don't hold a candle to that man. These are pimps, who pimp the potential blossoming and posperity of their own race, preferring to instead ride on their backs in the quest of celebrity, individual riches, and the sense of power that comes from extortion. It is not an enormous stretch from these moral values to present day Rawandan dictators who get rich off of corruption while millions die and the world yawns. In contrast Dr. King cared little about self and much about all of mankind. Oh he was human, he had flaws. But his words will live forever, for as long as the words "liberty and justice for all" will live. For his words apply not only to the downtrodden African Americans of the 60's, they resonate for every American. The Jacksons and Enfumes and Sharptons care little about the betterment of all mankind and have done even less to contribute to that. Dr. King died for his cause. Where todays black "leader" has fallen for the seduction of fame, money, and influence. How sad that there are no Martin Luther Kings around today to bring reason and truth to a community sorely in need of both.
When I was a teenager I will admit that I was pretty cynical about combining two presedents' birthdays into one holiday just so they could make a national holiday out of Martin Luther King's birthday-- I thought that it was little more than a political bone for a Democrat Administration losing popularity rapidly to throw in an attempt try and win minority votes, than it was a true desire by caring politicians to honor what this man really stood for, even as they themselves moved further and further away from those very values. But age and time has a way of puttng things into perspective, of making one understand things the way one cannot understand them as an ignorant youth. And this much is sure. If America, and particularly the minority communities had more people like Martin Luther King, this country would be one hell of a lot of a better place. Anyway, here is the Journal article, written from the perspective of an Iranian immigrant. Definitely worth the read. Happy Birthday, Dr. King. And thanks...
Dr. King and I
I never met him, but he made me love America.
BY ROYA HAKAKIAN
At 2 a.m. one night in September of 1985, I was a jet-lagged refugee on my brother's sofa in Parsippany, N.J., morosely clutching a remote. So grief-stricken was I over our departure from Iran that even television could not work its anodyne magic. What was I doing in the land of the despised Uncle Sam? I was a child of the 1979 revolution, with a teenager's disdain for hypocrisy. And the more I watched, the more hypocritical I seemed to myself. With my dismal English of that time, I heard only a "word spaghetti" as I watched TV, relieved only by the occasional tube of toothpaste, or the roll of flying toilet-paper. Consumerism! America in a nutshell!
As I kept channel surfing, I stumbled upon the face of a black man. He stood at a lectern in suit and tie, calm in front of a crowd of thousands. When the camera zoomed in to bring his close-up into focus, he seemed to look me right in the eye, as he said: "I have a dream . . ." These were the first four words I had understood all night. But even before the words, I'd felt his conviction. Was this elegant cadence really English, the language I so dreaded? The crowd emulated him. And as he spoke, they all, passionately, gracefully, uttered words of affirmation.
A most reluctant immigrant, I'd arrived in America confident that she could never win me over. Having just finished high school in post-revolutionary Iran, I thought myself impervious to her allures of infinite wealth, skyscrapers and shopping malls. My initial encounters hardly proved me wrong. Rude embassy staff sat behind bullet-proof windows and interviewed me on jail-style phones. Customs officers weighed me, probed into my ears, and vaccinated me. None ever spoke my name.
In those days, my universe was ruled by comparisons between the costs of goods based on the old currency and the new. The politeness of the old neighbors and the new. The ways of the old leaders and the new. Now this man at the lectern was making me reconsider the old leaders. Even at the most glorious moments of the Iranian revolution, long before the country took its dark turn, Ayatollah Khomeini had jarred me. His eyes were always cast down, or away. He had managed to fashion a Persian so irreverent that it was nearly unrecognizable against the language I knew through our great poets, Rumi and Hafez. The crowd around him sounded like a covey of pigeons, cooing. This was because, after their shouting frenzy abated, he spurred them to weeping.
Until that night, the only history I knew of America was a skewed tale of unchallenged dominance of the white race, first over Native Americans, then over the African slaves. On the news, after the siege of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, we had heard that the African-American staff was given the chance to leave, because they, too, had been "oppressed by the Great Satan." On TV, we watched reruns of documentaries on the KKK. A Tehran street was renamed after the Congolese leader Lumumba, assassinated by the CIA! As for American black leaders, Malcolm X was the man we knew best: a martyr!
I lay still, watching, as my smug confidence dissipated before my eyes.
Discovering the gaps in my knowledge had disarmed me: There was a man I knew nothing about, who was black as black could be, and had ultimately succeeded.
Today, in the distant corners where terror is raging, many teenagers hold views on America similar to those I once held. The enemy has an arsenal, but also a narrative. According to that narrative, the world's superpower represents only one race, and its history is a single tale of intolerance, arrogance, and domination. The war against this enemy is impossible to win without defeating that narrative. To tell American history in its entirety is to disprove the fabrications about who an American is. To tell the story of the Civil Rights Movement is to tell the story of how arrogance was made to give way to justice by none other than a man who advocated peace. Against the grim and infallible image that is painted of America, this will be a truer portrait: colorful and human.
For the immigrant, only the physical arrival is marked by a definitive moment when ships lower their anchors, and planes touchdown. The emotional arrival is incremental, and endless. Nearly 20 years later, Dr. Martin Luther King has come to mean to me all the things that he means to all Americans. But in retrospect, it was he who helped me reconcile with America. He proved to be yet another Plymouth Rock.
Ms. Hakakian, co-founder of Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, is the author of "Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran" (Crown, 2004).
There is a tendency in this country, especially among whites, and particularly in Southern cities like Houston, to associate Dr. King with the same current-day activists who followed King's legacy, and to believe that there was little difference between he and present day "civil rights" extortionists who besmirch Dr. King and everything he stood for by their very association with him. I'm talking about the Sharptons and the Jacksons and the Cynthia McKinneys. And I did a great disservice to Dr. King in ever thinking that, because today's activists don't hold a candle to that man. These are pimps, who pimp the potential blossoming and posperity of their own race, preferring to instead ride on their backs in the quest of celebrity, individual riches, and the sense of power that comes from extortion. It is not an enormous stretch from these moral values to present day Rawandan dictators who get rich off of corruption while millions die and the world yawns. In contrast Dr. King cared little about self and much about all of mankind. Oh he was human, he had flaws. But his words will live forever, for as long as the words "liberty and justice for all" will live. For his words apply not only to the downtrodden African Americans of the 60's, they resonate for every American. The Jacksons and Enfumes and Sharptons care little about the betterment of all mankind and have done even less to contribute to that. Dr. King died for his cause. Where todays black "leader" has fallen for the seduction of fame, money, and influence. How sad that there are no Martin Luther Kings around today to bring reason and truth to a community sorely in need of both.
When I was a teenager I will admit that I was pretty cynical about combining two presedents' birthdays into one holiday just so they could make a national holiday out of Martin Luther King's birthday-- I thought that it was little more than a political bone for a Democrat Administration losing popularity rapidly to throw in an attempt try and win minority votes, than it was a true desire by caring politicians to honor what this man really stood for, even as they themselves moved further and further away from those very values. But age and time has a way of puttng things into perspective, of making one understand things the way one cannot understand them as an ignorant youth. And this much is sure. If America, and particularly the minority communities had more people like Martin Luther King, this country would be one hell of a lot of a better place. Anyway, here is the Journal article, written from the perspective of an Iranian immigrant. Definitely worth the read. Happy Birthday, Dr. King. And thanks...
Dr. King and I
I never met him, but he made me love America.
BY ROYA HAKAKIAN
At 2 a.m. one night in September of 1985, I was a jet-lagged refugee on my brother's sofa in Parsippany, N.J., morosely clutching a remote. So grief-stricken was I over our departure from Iran that even television could not work its anodyne magic. What was I doing in the land of the despised Uncle Sam? I was a child of the 1979 revolution, with a teenager's disdain for hypocrisy. And the more I watched, the more hypocritical I seemed to myself. With my dismal English of that time, I heard only a "word spaghetti" as I watched TV, relieved only by the occasional tube of toothpaste, or the roll of flying toilet-paper. Consumerism! America in a nutshell!
As I kept channel surfing, I stumbled upon the face of a black man. He stood at a lectern in suit and tie, calm in front of a crowd of thousands. When the camera zoomed in to bring his close-up into focus, he seemed to look me right in the eye, as he said: "I have a dream . . ." These were the first four words I had understood all night. But even before the words, I'd felt his conviction. Was this elegant cadence really English, the language I so dreaded? The crowd emulated him. And as he spoke, they all, passionately, gracefully, uttered words of affirmation.
A most reluctant immigrant, I'd arrived in America confident that she could never win me over. Having just finished high school in post-revolutionary Iran, I thought myself impervious to her allures of infinite wealth, skyscrapers and shopping malls. My initial encounters hardly proved me wrong. Rude embassy staff sat behind bullet-proof windows and interviewed me on jail-style phones. Customs officers weighed me, probed into my ears, and vaccinated me. None ever spoke my name.
In those days, my universe was ruled by comparisons between the costs of goods based on the old currency and the new. The politeness of the old neighbors and the new. The ways of the old leaders and the new. Now this man at the lectern was making me reconsider the old leaders. Even at the most glorious moments of the Iranian revolution, long before the country took its dark turn, Ayatollah Khomeini had jarred me. His eyes were always cast down, or away. He had managed to fashion a Persian so irreverent that it was nearly unrecognizable against the language I knew through our great poets, Rumi and Hafez. The crowd around him sounded like a covey of pigeons, cooing. This was because, after their shouting frenzy abated, he spurred them to weeping.
Until that night, the only history I knew of America was a skewed tale of unchallenged dominance of the white race, first over Native Americans, then over the African slaves. On the news, after the siege of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, we had heard that the African-American staff was given the chance to leave, because they, too, had been "oppressed by the Great Satan." On TV, we watched reruns of documentaries on the KKK. A Tehran street was renamed after the Congolese leader Lumumba, assassinated by the CIA! As for American black leaders, Malcolm X was the man we knew best: a martyr!
I lay still, watching, as my smug confidence dissipated before my eyes.
Discovering the gaps in my knowledge had disarmed me: There was a man I knew nothing about, who was black as black could be, and had ultimately succeeded.
Today, in the distant corners where terror is raging, many teenagers hold views on America similar to those I once held. The enemy has an arsenal, but also a narrative. According to that narrative, the world's superpower represents only one race, and its history is a single tale of intolerance, arrogance, and domination. The war against this enemy is impossible to win without defeating that narrative. To tell American history in its entirety is to disprove the fabrications about who an American is. To tell the story of the Civil Rights Movement is to tell the story of how arrogance was made to give way to justice by none other than a man who advocated peace. Against the grim and infallible image that is painted of America, this will be a truer portrait: colorful and human.
For the immigrant, only the physical arrival is marked by a definitive moment when ships lower their anchors, and planes touchdown. The emotional arrival is incremental, and endless. Nearly 20 years later, Dr. Martin Luther King has come to mean to me all the things that he means to all Americans. But in retrospect, it was he who helped me reconcile with America. He proved to be yet another Plymouth Rock.
Ms. Hakakian, co-founder of Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, is the author of "Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran" (Crown, 2004).
