MLK’s imperfections help perfect his humanity and legacy

Sainthood is for the sacred, piety is for those whose ideas and actions cannot easily be replicated by the rest of us, from men and women who help keep the devout believing in perfection and in the light that fuels faith.

Saints, or the non-Catholic and even non-Christian equivalents, are a necessary ideal to drive many of us toward something more, for greater spirituality, moral enlightenment and benevolence.

Yet sainthood isn’t reality; the pious person is only an idea; they don’t exist in a way that connects with some of us on a visceral, human level.

Who among us can relate to perfection, to the idea that there are good, just, kind people doing great works on our behalves who don’t contain some thin layer of grime, who don’t have some questionably moral peccadillo or strange obsession that would make us cringe at best and shudder at worst?

The religious and nonreligious must both feel this in some sense. It’s why the salvation of the sinner is as appealing as the perfection of the virgin birth.

It’s why men like Cesar Chavez, Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela and Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. have such great power in our lives. They exist in tangible form, more like us than unlike us, with real desires, weaknesses, a moral ambivalence that makes up the background noise to a life lived in servitude to a greater social consciousness.

This week we celebrate the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; next week we observe the national holiday. Our children will get the day off from school, after most will have written reports on him, read letters and speeches by him, been taught his importance to the American experience and its future, the advance of Civil Rights and human equality.

What they won’t learn of — not yet anyway — is the extramarital affairs, the plagiarism, the questionable associations, some of the things that have become generally known and accepted.

What they won’t learn about at their young ages will be the smear campaigns against him, the wiretaps and bugs hidden in headquarters and hotel rooms recording his every move, the “efforts” by J. Edgar Hoover to use the weight of the FBI to discredit him, even kill him. Yes, kill him, considering an FBI-endorsed anonymous letter penned by one of Hoover’s underlings ended with a call for King to take his own life.

Let them be blissfully unaware of the imperfections in MLK’s personality and personal life. They will get the chance to hear the full measure of the man as they age, become more world-worn and able to form their own opinions.

And for the most part, MLK’s private moments of frailty and fear, of sexual dalliances amid the public righteousness, won’t tarnish him one bit in their eyes; it hasn’t for most.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is no different than all great men at the center of social change — they are men, with desires and weakness and a duality that exists to satisfy the soul as well as the senses. Yet they are men of great courage and conviction, who can seize a moment in time, draw inspiration from the ether and breathe it into the soul of those who hang on their every word, every deed, every effort.

And when the proof of anything less than perfection is put in front of the faces of their admirers and adherents, it is the vision of the great ones like King who show us the possibilities and how to see beyond the pettiness of the moment, beyond the temporary pain of the beatings, bodies sacrificed in hangings and burnings and bombings, the forces that keep society separated, that bear down on those who are different.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s humanity is what drew people to him, it is what allows his legacy to endure, not some lofty idea that he was a saint, that he was man perfected.

His purpose, his ability to see far off into the horizon to imagine what could and was to be is the true radiance of his greatness, a radiance and light that no amount of so-called filth or grime of his personal life, or the mud slung from the “Halls of Justice,” could diminish. Not then; not now.

Following the perfect down the path of righteousness might take some of us to salvation, but following the imperfect with a righteous cause will take us to a new reality, one of real change and real results in a real world.

This column originally appeared in the Imperial Valley Press, Jan. 16, 2015.