For several years now, we've had a saying at The Daily Felltoon we've shared with you, our readers, more than once. It's a saying that the granddad of of one of our staffers Mr. Strehlo, coined, we'd guess nearly a century ago: 'Anything worth doing is worth doing well."
We have a feeling Mr. Strehlo would have agreed fully with Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., who said, "All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence."
These two men - a first-generation German-American painter and handyman, and an American slave-descended Baptist preacher and civil rights activist - couldn't have been farther apart in many ways. One grew up speaking German and English, mixed together, in rural Minnesota. The other grew up speaking Southern-accented American English in a segregated Atlanta, Georgia.
Yet both men believed in that if a person was going to do something, they should always do it well - and do it right the first time, if at all possible.
With that in mind today, Martin Luther King Jr. Day - what would have been Dr. King's 83rd birthday - we have to wonder what kind of internal justification went through the minds of those responsible for the mangled and truncated quotation on the MLK monument in Washington, DC.
If you haven't yet had a chance to visit the MLK Memorial in DC - and we recommend that you do - like many of the best national and state monuments in DC and around the country, it's not just the marble, stone and brick facades that make the structure memorable. There are words and phrases carved in many places at the memorial that help bring the words of Dr. King to life, and help give visitors a better idea of who he was beyond the stories told about him.
One of those phrases is boldly carved into the right side of the primary monument that displays King's likeness - except that the quote is really a misquote. That poorly edited quote currently reads: "I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness." According to multiple sources, including a recent Washington Post piece, King's words were apparently truncated on the memorial because the architect and the sculptor for the project simply thought the memorial "would look better with fewer words."
Over the weekend, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar gave the National Park Service 30 days to begin fixing the massive screw-up that effectively inverted Dr. King's original words. The current misquotation almost makes King sound arrogant. The original comes from a 1968 speech where King was denouncing self-centered, egotistical, short-cut style thinking that others might use to attempt to define him: “If you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter.”
No one yet has any idea what the repair will cost, but we're certain that it will not come cheap. The monument itself was more than twenty-five years in the making, and cost more than $120 million dollars, though most of the cost was not tax dollars, but was raised through private donors.
This monstrous misquote however, is OUR collective mistake as Americans. Many in the media, and in the park service knew about it, even before the monument was unveiled, but let the misquote stand anyway. American taxpayers should and will pay for the repair to the monument, as we would to any other similar monument.
Our staff believes that neither our own personal mentors, like Mr. Strehlo, or a national guide like Rev. King, would want this repair to happen without using the incident as a teachable moment.
So here's our lesson for the day: It's true that doing anything well has its own rewards.
Doing things well also prevents one from having to pay the price for selfishly cutting corners at some later point in time.
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