2018 – The Year of Dr. King.

Posted on | January 2, 2018 | Comments Off on 2018 – The Year of Dr. King.

Mike Magee

We awaken this morning, on this sacred day that honors Martin Luther King Jr., to the continued reverberation of racist and profane commentary days ago from his polar opposite, a man who adds insult to injury by bragging that his vile actions will help him in the polls.

And yet 2018 has the potential to be a monumental turn-around year for America, a year when we stare our true culture in the face, and decide to embrace health and well-being.

Fifty years ago, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. warned that excessive materialism, militarism, and racism were “inseparable triplets”, and that our nation required a “revolution of values…a restructuring of the very architecture of American society.” Recently, conservative columnist David Brooks said as much with these words, “The first step in launching our own revival is understanding that the problem is down in the roots.”

Our culture is so blatant in its disrespect for human and planetary health that it’s simply hard to ignore any longer. Dr. King recognized this core truth a half century ago when he said, “We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality.”

With new leadership in 2018, we might begin the long transformative step toward a healthier culture.

On gun violence:

Our’s is a country that not only allows and promotes guns, but also now limits federally funded research on gun violence and has attempted to muzzle physicians who wish to discuss gun safety with their patients. There were 36,161 motor vehicle crash deaths in 2015. That’s bad, but it’s 91 fewer deaths than caused by guns that year. We’re killing 100 people a day with our guns, 60% of which are suicides – successful 90% of the time when a gun is the instrument.

On planetary health:

We just marked the 25th anniversary of the landmark “Warning to Humanity”, a consensus document filed by 1,700 scientists on global warming. Trump’s pull-out of the Paris Accord aside, the group now 15,000 scientists strong from 184 countries, just published an update in the journal BioScience. Lead scientist, Henry Kendall, states, “If not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and animal kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know.”

On childhood obesity:

Futurists now predict that the obesity rate in today’s children, when they hit adulthood, will be 57%. And with this, soaring rates of diabetes and heart disease surely follow, while health resources are diverted to elusive “scientific progress” as American “human progress” continues in steep decline.

On gender inequality and abuse:

Of course, the list goes on – consider the mind-boggling short and long-term implications of what appears endemic sexual abuse in and out of our workplaces. And that doesn’t even begin to address the fact that we seem to have managed to elect as our president a man who is a confessed serial sexual abuser.

Yet, to his credit, President Trump, with his vile labels, has done nothing more than force us to face, in sharp relief, our true selves and the “inseparable triplets” Dr. King described now 50 years ago. The time has come to fulfill his dream of a healthier America. 2018 is the year, and elections are just a few short months away.