19 January 2008

Sic Transit Gloria


They say it is going to get cold again, and it would be inconvenient if I had been planning on being outside. It is a three-day weekend for a lot of folks, though not in the cockpit of action. I had to call a series of meetings of the partners on Monday to get ready for a submission to the Government customer on Tuesday.

The Government has Monday off in order to honor Dr. Martin Luther King's sacrifice. I take it phlegmatically, since the mostly civilian government also takes off Veteran's day to honor the sacrifice of the veterans who are working that day in the private sector.

None-the-less, I found myself a bit dyspeptic as I contemplated the keyboard this morning, preparing to re-draft the technical document we will be discussing on the holiday. This is a significant one, right there in my mind with the one honoring the other great martyr, Mr. Lincoln, who at the moment of his triumph was yanked down.

I remember the controversy about establishing Dr. King's day. There was all that coded claptrap from the past, the assertion that there were too many holidays already, and this was the equivalent of the late Roman Empire's calendar, in which there were so many public holidays that no work was done at.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

"Thus passes the glory of the world," is how the Latin has been translated, and I would have done it that way with my crib sheet in Mrs. Kannell's class decades ago. In the life of the Catholic Church, though, though it has a more colloquial meaning.

Traditionally, Papal coronations are thrice interrupted by a monk who announces three times: "Pater sancte, sic transit gloria mundi."

Holy Father, Fame is Fleeting. Despite the grandeur of this ceremony, you are a mortal man.

I'm mortal, and never forget it. I happened to be in Atlanta for a conference two years ago, in the humid Georgia Spring. The topic was public safety, and the communications necessary to ensure it. My role was to gather information and put in a good word for my then-company's capability to contribute to the critical mission area.

There was a lot of scheming about spectrum and bandwidth that is far to complex for the ordinary mortal to understand. Suffice it to say in shorthand, it was largely about how to replace the hand that was in Uncle Sam's wallet already, and replace it with others. I viewed myself (and my colleagues, who actually knew what they were doing) as working on the side of the angels.

We knew who the greedy bastards were, and we knew they walked among us.

I also was realistic enough to know that the deal on the spectrum would be cut in a way that would benefit the good and the banal, and thus added a purely personal agenda item to the day's schedule of break-out sessions and side-bar discussions.

The upper band of the 700Mhz spectrum was going to be discussed in the afternoon, and instead of proceeding to that partitioned conference room, turned left in the lobby of the Omni Hotel and waved for a cab.

After I plopped down in back, I asked the driver to take me to the Ebenezer Baptist Church at 407 Auburn Avenue.

The journey was physically not far, and the skyline of the downtown reached out as the cab dropped me in front of the old church. Across the street was a gleaming new structure where the congregation worships today. It was completed just before the millennium, and since then the National Park Service manages the old sanctuary, and was in the process of completing the restoration of the structure to the period when Dr. King preached there with his father.

It was a weekday, and there were few tourists in the neighborhood that had been known as Sweet Auburn. Up the street was the house where he was born and grew to manhood, and dreamed the great dream.

He grew up in a neighborhood that was the center of African American life in the segregated city, and Auburn Avenue was known in the 1950s as "the richest Negro street in the world."

The red brick church had the smell of old wood and polish that day, and the organ was silent. It is lovingly maintained, and that day the sun poured in warm through the tall stained glass windows, The pews sat silently as I down the aisle, wondering at the transit of glory in human affairs, and found myself in front of the organ.

The pipes have been refurbished by the Park Service and it would have sounded good, if anyone was playing it. I peered at the bench. It was where Dr. King's mother was seated, playing for the opening of the service when she was murdered in June of 1974.

Marcus Wayne Chenault was the man who opened fire from these pews as the packed sanctuary was commencing the Lord's Prayer. He screamed that he was “taking over” as he emptied two pistols at the altar and the organ. When he was done, Alberta Christine Williams King lay dying along with Deacon Edward Boykin.

It was not a senseless crime, in so far that Chenault later said that he “hated all Christians,” and Dr. King Senior, who was about to make his entrance, was probably the most famous pastor in the land after the murder of his son. He probably was the target, since police later found a list of the ten most prominent Black clerics in America in Chenault's apartment.

I thought about it, on the plaza around the long reflecting pool that surrounds the junior King's white sepulcher. His wife Coretta, now lies in a bed of flowers across from him, framing the skyscrapers. I had come partly in curiosity, since there was great controversy about Dr. King's papers, and the activities of the Foundation that had been established by the family in his name.

When the cab came to take me back to the Omni, I found myself almost overwhelmed. Dr. King knew the likely consequences of his crusade, of standing up to centuries of oppression. He did it without blinking and without bowing his head, except to his God.

I am not particularly religious, but I have to stand in awe to that sort of courage. Since the great compromise about the holiday was made, the one that gave the Federal workforce the day off in Dr. King's honor and left the rest of us to work, there has been an only slightly ironic saying about it.

“MLK Day: Not a day off. A day on.” I wrote that in the e-mail announcing the meetings on Monday, and apologized for the inconvenience.

Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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