MLK day. Wow... while I will work a normal workday today, I would be remiss not to acknowledge the significance of this day. Or more appropriately, the significance of the man. I have read a lot lately about "What Martin Luther King did.." and most of that has been incredibly lucid and insightful prose. But IMHO it has all fallen short. Martin Luther King was THE most influential human being of the 20th Century. I will pause a moment for yall to pick your jaws up off the floor. "How can you say that?" I hear people gasping. What about FDR? What about JFK? What about:  fill in your exceptional world leader here? Nope.. none of those people surpass what that man did. And here's why... Martin Luther King clearly did great things for black folk in America, and influenced the American  society to move forward from a dark and ugly time in its existence. But his influence was so much greater than that.

 Martin Luther King empowered the human rights movements around the world for the next 50 years and beyond. His movement, challenging America to live up to its stated ideals of freedom and equality of opportunity for all within its own borders, shamed the U.S. into working in earnest to gets its own house in order with regard to Civil Rights, racism, bigotry et al. Without this change, I have no doubt whatsoever that our desired influence which we have attempted to peddle around the world. Without Martin Luther King, our attempts to end apartheid in South Africa, while conducting our own apartheid here at home, likely never get anywhere. Without Martin Luther King, our attempts to hold ourselves up as a beacon of light for human rights all around the globe, while oppressing 10% of our population in a manner that Pol Pot would be proud of, get laughed out of the United Nations. Our righteously indignant decrying of Kim Jogn Il, Hugo Chavez, Mubharak, Ahmadenajad, Saddam Hussein, Moamar Ghadaffi, Castro, Putin, Gorbachev, the list goes on and on, all result in those people being able to simply hold up a mirror for us to look into if not for what Martin's movement forced us to do. I don't think that it is a stretch at all to proclaim that Martin Luther King's movement is responsible for the ability of this country to effectively exert its influence in the realm of human rights around the globe. As such Martin is responsible for more people being freed and ultimately not murdered by oppressive governments than any other person in human history - a number probably in the hundreds of millions.

Lastly, we would still be decades away from being enlightened enough to elect a black president were it not for Martin Luther King. And I sincerely doubt Mr. Obama is oblivious to that fact.