Today is my dad’s birthday, and today is also Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. When people would point out to my dad that he shared his birthday with MLK, he would say, “Yup! Good people were born on this day!” He would smile, and this would elicit a smile from the person who brought it up.
I’m wondering how to honor my dad today, and how to honor MLK Day. The answer that comes to me is “Work.” Work was my dad’s favorite. As a kid, I often felt like my dad liked his work more than he liked me, his daughter. My dad died of Alzheimer’s in 2020, but ten years before his death, I started a business partnership with a friend, and my dad and I bonded over business talk. He had been a quality control consultant for machine shops throughout the midwest, and he loved working with the employees of those companies to come up with ways to make their businesses more efficient.
Work was also at the core of Dr. King’s ethic. In school growing up, we would learn about Dr. King’s work each year around this time. We would watch films about the Civil Rights movement, read books, create art, talk about the bus boycotts, sing “We Shall Overcome” at school assembles, listen to recordings or recitations of the “I Have a Dream Speech.” Dr. King’s life was one of marching, protesting, preaching, leading, boycotting, working.
These days my work is mothering, practicing, writing and teaching. Mothering my kids and teaching them about the ways the world is unjust, and encouraging them to make it more just. Writing my experiences, my heart, my thoughts, my dreams. Teaching martial arts and self-defense. Teaching how to stand up for ourselves, how to protect ourselves, how to express ourselves, how to fight for ourselves. At the core of that is learning how to value ourselves enough to fight for ourselves in the first place. And then, how to fight as peacefully as possible.
Many of the best martial artists I know are pacifists, and that is because we know how much fighting hurts. Fighting is glamorized in the movies: people fight, fall down, and get back up. But anyone who has really been punched in the face knows, it hurts. It takes you out for a while. It rings your bell. After getting punched in the face you don’t continue forward as though nothing happened.
My previous kung fu teacher would say, “Contact changes everything.” That phrase encapsulates the reality of violence. Violence, war, can seem courageous and righteous, but at its core, it is pain. Hurt. Destruction. Death.
So how do we keep fighting peacefully? Here is where we look to the example of Dr. Martin Luther King. We illuminate the problems in our culture. Then we call them out, we resist, we fight. We protest. We strike. We make art. We share. We sing. We speak. We write. We dance. We imagine. We dream.
Michelle Folk Johnson 