Martin Luther King miscellanea

First, ten quotes from MLK.
•Second, an article by Diana Wynne Jones on heroes. Referring to the protagonist of Aunt Maria: “Mig, in raising her game has sensed that there is something other and better and this is what she has to go for. This sense of something other and better is what heroes give us a glimpse of when they raise their game. And this is why we need heroes.”
I think that fits MLK pretty well.
Now, the political. Rick Perlstein points out that no matter how much conservatives praise him now, when Martin Luther King was alive, many of them condemned him as a dangerous threat. In this 2010 post, I noted that absolute color-blindness, even in fighting discrimination, is not what the civil rights movement was about. And Slacktivist quotes an MLK sermon about the very rich and the very poor to refute Mitt Romney’s claim that criticism of the 1 percent is all about envy: “Dives didn’t go to hell because he was rich; Dives didn’t realize that his wealth was his opportunity. It was his opportunity to bridge the gulf that separated him from his brother Lazarus. Dives went to hell because he was passed by Lazarus every day and he never really saw him. He went to hell because he allowed his brother to become invisible. Dives went to hell because he maximized the minimum and minimized the maximum. Indeed, Dives went to hell because he sought to be a conscientious objector in the war against poverty.”
And here’s an MLK quote I particularly like: “The road to freedom is a difficult, hard road. It always makes for temporary setbacks. And those people who tell you today that there is more tension in Montgomery than there has ever been are telling you right. Whenever you get out of Egypt, you always confront a little tension, you always confront a little temporary setback. If you didn’t confront that you’d never get out.
You must remember that the tensionless period that we like to think of was the period when the Negro was complacently adjusted to segregation, discrimination, insult, and exploitation. And the period of tension is the period when the Negro has decided to rise up and break aloose from that. And this is the peace that we are seeking: not an old negative obnoxious peace which is merely the absence of tension, but a positive, lasting peace, which is the presence of brotherhood and justice. And it is never brought about without this temporary period of tension. The road to freedom is difficult.”