Mat TGR, my latest on MLK and work. This time, on justice and opportunity:

King often cited the emerging global economy as a liberating force that would bind people closer together. Walking through the different products you use in the morning – sponges from islands in the Pacific and coffee from Africa, and on and on – he would conclude: “Before you even finish your breakfast, you are interdependent with half the world.”

That was right. Perhaps King could not have foreseen the backlash through which we are now living, in which the forces of reaction against the new global world are drawing new strength from fear and anomie amid the dissolution of old cultural certainties. The death throes of the old, ethnocentric public orders – once thought to have been over with the defeat of the fascist powers – may be longer and harder than we had foreseen.

But make no mistake, death throes is what they are.

Let me know what you think!