There is something inherently evil about being non-productive on the Martin Luther King "holiday."
Should I choose non-work on this day, I am endorsing the State’s choice of a day of rest. I would be sanctioning King’s democratic socialism and grandiloquent notions of redistributing from the Do’s to the Do-Not’s. It is clear that virtually no employer would give such an absurd holiday were it not for PC pressure or State mandates. In my line of work as a corporate CPA, the timing of the holiday is made worse by the fact that we are in a crunch to close the books at year-end and produce financial statements. It’s a blow against capitalism if you ask me.
But since I work in a predominately black city, management at my company has decided that they shall seek the politically correct route for the very first time this year. A day off for all of us. Whoopee.
President’s Day, however, is not a component of the holiday package where I work. The birthday of two dead white guys is hardly a politically correct necessity. If I were boss for a day, I’d make everybody work mega-overtime on MLK day to give the Reverend King a capitalistic slap-in-the-face, and I’d make a holiday of April 14th, the anniversary of the war criminal Lincoln’s comeuppance at the hands of John Wilkes Booth. The aggressor who had ordered the abolition of freedom of the press and speech, of habeus corpus, of sound money, and of freedom from income taxes, and who had commanded the shooting of hundreds of thousands, and the starving of millions, found out what it was like. However, since April 14th falls on a Saturday this year, and since I’m not the boss, it shall not be. (My Catholicism teaches me not to celebrate any man’s death, even Lincoln’s, so I guess we’d actually be mourning the death of Booth.)
The anti-capitalist King, who was reluctant to ever display his radical socialist roots to the public, believed that a restructuring of American society was essential to economic equality for blacks. He blamed minority poverty on injustices in our economic system, and he believed that black freedom would require a world-wide movement toward socialist planning.
And yet, I am supposed to sit home on this day in silent praise of the glories of a man who used the civil rights platform to forward his Marxist "class struggle." I will not.
Instead, Monday will find me amongst one or two other workaholics looking beyond the holiday. My boss will love my work ethic, but I’ll smile because I know I have a more fundamental reason for working. In fact, I’ll smile as I remember the heroic Arizona governor Evan Mecham, who, having had the MLK holiday forced on his state by leftist parasites, promptly repealed the law, though it was eventually restored again. I had once cheered the great state of Arizona in all her attempts to resist the mob.
One thing I shall enjoy about MLK day is that my commute along the public road system will be made easier. After all, government workers and socialists enjoying the day off will be at the mall looking for a Sony PlayStation instead of heading downtown to work and be productive.
As much as I could bask in a three-day weekend, I shall remain true to my moral obligations, and work this non-holiday. But I will not work for free, for I shall use the day off for something far more worthy, March 2nd — Murray Rothbard’s birthday.
Karen De Coster is a politically incorrect CPA, and an MA student in economics at Walsh College in Michigan.
