Page 14 THE VILLADOM TIMES IV • January 16, 2013 their presence to the whites who rallied to beat up people who only asked to register to vote. That, in and of itself, could make up for the un-scheduling of a holiday that should be important to all of us. More to the point, what is the next step now that blacks can vote and can hope for an education? The schools will undoubtedly answer that once everybody has a college education, all will be well. There are two problems with that: Based on observation, not everybody wants a college education, and once some people get a college education, they have no clue as to what to do with it. A well-kept secret is that most people outside the professions could hold down their day jobs with what Europeans generally learn in middle school and most Americans complete in high school. The twist here is that people who have college diplomas generally avoid productive hands-on or manual labor and expect the bureaucracy or the community to furnish them with a responsible job and a regular paycheck. This is no longer possible. Beyond all the goodies we see or read in the mass media looms a disconcerting fact: We have gone deep into debt to foreign powers to fund American social programs politicians need to get elected. Britain did that...now look! They had to raise their income tax for toffs from six percent to 60 percent and a lot of the great estates are now run as tourist attractions, while the urban poor of all races riot at the suggestion that their dole be reduced. Educating American people for jobs that will not exist when they graduate is a great form of teacher and professor protection but is an abuse to the hopes of most of the students. We need to get back to teaching people the skilled trades, and teaching them that they are not too good for the skilled trades if they cannot master calculus or foreign languages outside the Romance tradition and the Roman alphabet. One is better off being a celebrity chef than an unemployed cold-call salesman. In the short run, the best way we can commemorate King is to use the non-holiday to give an adolescent audience whose minds are still permeable an idea of just what it must feel like to be black in America. This might not be easy, but the schools are our last chance. Some year ago, one of my students and I discovered a piece of research that somehow made all the parts fit: why the dynasty of Frederick Douglass disappeared with his sons. We learned about something that happened to Lewis Douglass, Frederick’s oldest son and the sergeant major of the 54th Massachusetts -- the part Morgan Freeman played in “Glory.” The incident that befell Lewis Douglass was not a disgrace, but stemmed from a genuine act of heroism. The misfortunes of his brother, his brother-in-law, and the white officer who survived along with them and strongly supported attempts to build a free black economy after the war, have all been consigned to literary oblivion. The economics are that the magazines that cover the Civil War have a substantially Southern or very conservative readership, and none of the editors, including those who have published my previous stories will buy and print this story. Meanwhile, the black magazines that might have run this as a human interest story appear to all be closed or otherwise not interested. Why? Life holds many puzzles. Conversely, I seem to have become the reviewer of choice for books about John Brown, the violent white abolitionist leader, and of those black soldiers who fought for their own freedom. Can it be that nobody else is interested? I hate to mandate what kids read, but putting this stuff in the school curriculum could be the last chance to get it before an audience of meaningful size. The next phase is to make sure all large employers funded by tax money hire a number of blacks proportionate to the local or county or state population. Hiring your own relatives, or people who look like you or like you would want to look, may be a form of entirely normal behavior, but it also makes education meaningless for people who cannot land jobs commensurate with their education. I once worked at a place where the editorial policy was invariably in favor of throwing maximum amounts of taxpayer money at every “urban” problem that cropped up. I suggested to the management that a black kid named Curtis, who was working as a custodian, had a college degree, and was a fine natural writer be given a chance at being a reporter and offered to cooperate with him. I was met with a sort of silence that was too slimy to be stony. I met Curtis a few years later after we both quit. “I see they got you too, Mr. Koster,” he said. “I guess you told them some things they didn’t want to hear.” One of the things they no longer want to hear is the demographic steamroller. A quarter century from now, the majority of Americans of military age will no longer be white. A half-century from now, the majority of all Americans will no longer be white. I see dire things ahead for people who celebrate the heroes of the Alamo and shrug off African slavery or what happened to the Indians as the previous law of the land. Maybe we have reached the time when everybody should start treating one another with respect while we can do so without undue humiliation. The year’s first controversy in northwest Bergen County surfaced in Glen Rock when the Glen Rock Board of Education decided to use half of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a school day so the board could avoid a more disruptive scheduling of school holidays. The other two makeup days will be April 11 and 12, culled from a scheduled spring break. The reshuffling was made necessary by school time lost to Hurricane Sandy. You can call this one either way. I would not have done it in that manner. Martin Luther King Day has been set aside to honor the memory of the slain civil rights leader, but also, I think, to show respect for the phenomenal struggle the black population has had in America for the last three centuries. School authorities indicated that they will set aside time during the half-day session on Jan. 21 for appropriate activities. I personally suggest a screening of “Glory,” which my son saw in Glen Rock High School 15 years ago. That eyeopener could take a lot of the sting out of chopping half of Martin Luther King Day, but I still have some reservations about the message this chop sends to blacks in particular and the community in general. My most recent personal encounter with the legacy of Dr. King came a few years ago when one of my former tutorial students asked me for some advice in a college expository writing assignment. Dr. King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” was one of the three selections. The second selection was three views of a shark -- live at the salt-aquarium, stuffed at the Museum of Natural History, and decomposing in a shallow vat of formaldehyde. The third selection was about a family where just about everybody was a transvestite and was blaming the father who was also a transvestite. I am not a transvestite, nor am I much of a shark. The letter from jail was easily the best passage we discussed, but it probably got into the list of literary selections because Dr. King’s work could not safely be excluded from an anthology without arousing protest. Whatever the reason the selection survived the chopping block, it was the only one of the three selections I could read with any appreciation. The argument of the letter, as I remember, was that nonviolent defiance of unjust laws was worth a temporary loss of respectability in jail because the need was so enormous. Roll back the clock to the beginning of the civil rights movement and understand that, 100 years after the Civil War should have settled the matter forever, blacks in the South were still denied the right to vote and were sequestered in deficient “separate but unequal” schools. This was grotesquely unjust, and opposition to this injustice dignified the lives and deaths of the people who had to die or be beaten in what could be called the Second Civil War. The worst of the injustice faded gradually and with considerable bloodshed and brutality. There are some excellent documentaries showing what the beatings and the bus burnings of civil rights activists looked like. I recommend that any district that opens the schools on Martin Luther King Day show one of them. Most people in their right minds would not want to lend Preserving the dream Ramsey Group gathers Members of the Ramsey Walks group gather each day at the Ramsey Senior Center at Finch Park following their daily walks. Here they are shown celebrating the members with December birthdays, including Salvatore Capone, Margaret Davis, Cathy Murray, and MeeLon Yee.