Sticker Shock: MLK Blasphemy

On Sunday, January 14th enjoyed reading “A King We Hardly Knew,” Derrick Jackson’s stirring article about early, previously undiscovered Martin Luther King Jr. writings. King had questions he struggled to answer. The answers would define a leader and shape a movement.
58 years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, "Our material and intellectual advances have outrun our moral progress." At the advent of the iphone, which is both a material and intellectual advance, not much has changed. Perhaps the situation is worse.
Just when I thought it was safe to go back to the mall—I should have learned my lesson—it's never safe to go back to the mall. It seems there'll always be some appalling display of selfishness next to the display of $300 jeans. Dodging swarms of preteen queens with credit cards and cell phones, navigating mazes of mannequins and crossing a treacherous-treat-filled-food-court using only my wits and an outdated, unreliable map; I managed to get out of the fabric and plastic jungle alive, with most of my money intact. I needed a new pair of jeans, plain old Levi’s, which set me back 25 bucks.
I employ the same survival tactics on the home front. The glossy parts of the paper usually meet the recycling bin before the rest of The Dallas Morning News enters my house. But lurking in the front-page section in large platoons, those pesky ads ambush readers. A one-page ad in today's paper trumpeted MLK's words:
"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."
Tribute or not, King probably didn't mean standing in the produce department of Kroger facing the challenge of choosing apples or oranges.
Gunther, the barber who can never get Curtis’s name right from Ray Billingsley's always funny and well-drawn comic strip Curtis, grumbles over a used car lot's solicitous use of King Day. It’s a shame. I thank Mr. Billingsley for exposing this issue to a large audience.