I live in Arizona, where this is not a holiday. I am workign today, even thoguh I work for a California company, and I think that's the way it ought to be.
I don't beleive in the celebration of a national holiday for Martin Luther King day; not because I don’t like black people, or Dr. King; but because it might as well be renamed “token black day”.
There are far more deserving historical figures to have national holidays named after: Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison et al… yes all dead white men. I don’t denigrate the achievements of King, or his importance as a symbol of the good of the civil rights movement; but MLK day in fact does not honor him, it reduces his legacy to a day off of work.
Martin Luther King day is a convenient way to tokenize the history of black achievement into an easily digestible and dismissable format. It is literally token black day, and they simply chose King as the name of the token.
That I think spits on the goals and ideals of Dr. King.
