Where do you stand in times of controversy?

“Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King III is today 8 years older than his father was when he was assassinated at age 39 in 1968. But even as the younger King ages, his father’s cause of racial equality and brotherhood continues.

Martin Luther King Jr. found other social afflictions to be as harmful as he found ignorance. His son, who recently spoke to grade-school and high school students in Arizona, points out three plagues humanity still suffers from: poverty, racism and violence.

Relying on oratorial cadence as his father did, King said today’s youth often see the “three R’s” as something else: “running, rapping and rhyming.” That’s fine, he told youngsters. But “it is mastering reading, writing and arithmetic that turns us into who will be become.”

Society labors today to achieve racial and ethnic diversity. But King said these goals cannot be achieved without respect for the dignity and self-worth of each person.

“Even if in life it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, go on — sweep streets like Michelangelo solved problems, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry, sweep streets like Rafael painted pictures,” he said.

King’s father might be surprised, perhaps even a bit unnerved, by the many mid-January events held in his honor today. In Clovis, a scholarship banquet honored his memory on Saturday and a memorial walk is scheduled for 9 a.m. today, beginning at Roy Walker Community Center, 316 W. 2nd.

MLK might be expected to observe that his message, his work, isn’t reflected so much in the shiny plates on which fine meals are served before speeches to largely sympathetic crowds.

Poverty, racism and violence — these horrible plagues upon society are not found in banquet halls among those who believe most in King’s message, but in the streets, the workplaces, the halls of government and the schools where are the many who believe in it the least.

For every voice raised up at these well-organized, meaningful events, if a voice were raised in love to one who hates or discriminates, to somehow dispel the evils that hatred has wrought, it might speed the day when such a voice would be no longer needed.

Were every dollar spent on a King Day meal to go directly to educate the ignorant, provide jobs to the unemployed, give shelter to the homeless, show the violent that there are peaceful ways to resolve differences, it might speed the day when neither the banquets nor the dollars would be needed.

In his 1963 work, “Strength to Love,” King observed that “the ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” On this day named for him, let us resolve to include that entreaty in our individual lives, to go beyond comfortable confines to where the evils of society dwell, and, in our own way, set forth to vanquish them once and for all.