martin luther king jr.

I have always loved this quote by Dr. King:

The curse of poverty has no justification in our age.

I had to stop myself today while I was running around at work (yeah, I still had to go in) to really sit and meditate on the meaning of this holiday. I try to do that every year and sometimes I succeed sometimes I don't. Today had a different spin. I think we focus on Dr. King's message about racial equality and rightly so. He also spoke a lot about poverty, however, and it's beyond relevant today in many ways. In light of the global recession, black men having the largest unemployment rate in the country and, of course, the devestation of Haiti's capital all make his words all the more imperative.

In my own life I have seen poverty affect people in horrible ways: women stay with abusive men, children cry themselves to sleep because they're hungry, homelessness, eating out of trash cans, prostitution for rent payments and so on. These were all witnessed just in my personal life in the United States. I've heard and seen in film similarly atrocious things around the world.

My meditation and prayer today, on this day honoring Dr. King, is that I and all who have the capacity to should take those words to heart and act.