Errin Haines writes, in an AP story:
Many use the King holiday to celebrate King’s life and struggle for human rights. Some choose to honor King by following the Baptist preacher’s example of service to their fellow man. For others, the holiday is equal to Presidents’ or Columbus Day: Just an excuse for a long weekend, to take a short vacation or do nothing.
Haines forgot to mention that, for many of us, the forced long weekend amounts to severe inconvenience. I have always found it interesting that most legal holidays are observed, for the most part, by the ruling class – and yes, I use this term loosely. It is called a “bank holiday” and a “legal holiday”. Is it not the bankers and politicians who lord over us? Government offices are required to be closed and. Wikipedia defines it thus:
A civil holiday, civic holiday, legal holiday, or work holiday is a day that is legally recognized and celebrated as a holiday in a particular sovereign state orjurisdictional subdivision of such, e.g., a state or a province and may be known as a public holiday. It is usually a day that the legislature, parliament, congress, orsovereign has declared by statute, edict, or decree as a non-working day when the official arms of government such as the court system are closed.
Of course, the postal service falls in this category. Those who work in the services (other than government), manufacturing or retail do not benefit from this long weekend. As a matter of fact, they suffer from it. How many times have you been in a situation where a check had to clear the bank, or you desperately awaited something in the mail or you needed a government agency to take care of something for you (due to their own demands) and your agonizing wait was prolonged due to one of these long weekends? The three-day weekends are generally a luxury for members of the ruling class and those who work directly for them. Their idleness, at these times, imposes a burden upon the class of the ruled – those who’s labor has intrinsic value*.
In conclusion, the “long weekend” is just another tool of oppression. A stark reminder of who rules over whom, just in case any of us were to somehow forget. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the only American individual, to be honored by his own federal holiday, is named “King”.
* If the U.S. Postal service had intrinsic value (and here I mean a natural value that the free market would assign it absent any coercion), then there would be no need for laws enforcing its monopoly.
The “official” celebration in St. Louis was awful as usual. The (black) Chief of Police moaned on and on that (black) crime is robbing (black) “yoots” of “Dr. King’s dream.” Except all that black crime he deals with is the fruition of “Dr.” King’s “dream” — The fruits of his labor are numerous well known and lesser well known Federal legislative packages and Federal court decisions, plus many equivalents on the state level, where they instruct Official America to ignore the reality of racial differences and handcuff white cops in the face of black crime.
Also speaking there was Roy Blunt, Missouri’s newest U.S. Senator. He essentially said the same things. Which only proves that I would have been right to vote for the Constitution Party candidate, if I had a vote in MO last November (I lived in IL at the time.)
It was surprising to me that Missouri’s “Republican” Lieutenant Governor, one Peter Kinder, who is the sort of “lover” that follows a certain racial pejorative, wasn’t there. This is right up his alley. Note the Kinder family and the Limbaughs (yes, him, and yes, them) are family friends, they’re both out of Cape Girardeau.
And, just as the “Great” Reagan bought us MLK Day on a national basis, we can blame a similar personality for foisting this travesty on the state of Missouri twenty-five years ago this year, one John Ashcroft. You might have heard of him.
Presumably you get the day off from work?
Who me? No; I’m just a grunt.
I always celebrate MLK with a bucket of the Colonel’s finest.
To be fair, I don’t do anything event-appropriate to acknowledge Presidents, Memorial, Labor, Columbus or Veterans Days, either.
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And the USPS has a monopoly on letters to maintain the artificial single price of a stamp. It doesn’t cost them anything like 44 cents to deliver a letter between office buildings in the same city. But if we let private enterprises compete on only the profitable routes, it would cost five dollars to send a Christmas card to your aunt in rural Montana.