I’m a little bit bummed to be working on Dr. Martin Luther King’s Birthday. But, I could have taken a floating holiday – a lot of people did. Our parent company is in the U.K. so their philosophy in the “global workplace” is to give people the floaters and let each person take them on the holidays that mean the most to them.

I have used floaters, when I had them, for King Day at companies I worked for in the past. This year, in the commotion surrounding the test and the class ending, I forgot what day it was being celebrated – I thought it was happening next week. Goes to show you what kind of tunnel vision I had.

I think King Day is an important holiday. A lot of people call it a “black holiday”. I’ve heard it said to African-American co-workers “it’s your holiday”, which I personally feel is stupid. Anybody who has to hire, runs a company, department, or shop benefits enormously from the strides made in the Civil Rights movement lead by Dr. King and others. It’s a bonus right in the pocket book – it always amazes me when people don’t see that.

By including everyone in equal opportunity education and hiring, the pool of qualified candidates for every job gets larger and more competitive. If this office didn’t embrace diversity, it literally couldn’t run. The best person on our team –by far the most skilled, talented underwriter, maybe in the whole department – is an African American woman who went to college back when classes had to be canceled due to all the student protests. She has literally made millions of dollars for the companies who’ve been lucky enough to get her as an employee.

These days work is too complex, the skill sets required have become too narrow, to discriminate against anybody who can do the job. People who think that making sure that everybody’s kids have the opportunity to educate themselves is “somebody else’s problem” couldn’t be more wrong. We’ve got a lot of problems in this country. It’s no joke that a mind is terrible thing to waste, especially in an age where we need as many minds as possible thinking about the greatest challenges facing us as humans. We’ve got plenty of practical problems to solve, like how to solve the energy crisis and what to do about global warming, to say nothing about ethical issues on the borders of bio-medical research and human rights.

And none of that takes into account the social benefits that have come from integration – the friendships and relationships, the social stability enjoyed in many of our large cities as people from all over the world converge where opportunity is the greatest. When I go down to Washington and walk around I see people walking around, not representatives of ethnic groups.

Having come this far, we can go farther. I have a dream, and lots of people share it: that one day there won’t be little boxes on forms for “race” because everyone will only be “human”, that one day, in this wildfire information age, language barriers will disappear, that one day, we’ll look around and realize that there’s no body different enough from us to fight with, no reason to go to war, that the benefits of working together peacefully would be far, far greater than anything that could be accomplished by advancing one nation state, one ideology, one way of life. And because I’ve seen parts of Dr. King’s dream come true in my own lifetime, there’s no reason for me to think that parts of my own dream might not come true in the lifetime of my niece and nephews.

Human nature is NOT violent, selfish, “red in tooth and claw”. It’s empathy, co-operation, and investment in the future that separate us from animals, not merely superior language skills or superior tool using skills. Christians like me believe we were created in God’s image – not physically, but spiritually. We’re not doomed to endless bloodshed, suffering, and warfare by “the Law of the Jungle”. We come from a higher place and we are on our way back to it, both as individuals and as a race of people.

Humans. Stick together. We can do it.