Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
— Martin Luther King, Strength to Love, 1963
As Martin Luther King’s birthday is celebrated with a national holiday, his death day disappears down the memory hole. Across the country – in response to the King Holiday and Service Act passed by Congress and signed by Bill Clinton in 1994 – people will be encouraged to make the day one of service (from Latin, servus = slave). Etymological irony aside, such service does not include King’s commitment to protesting a decadent system of racial and economic injustice or non-violently resisting the warfare state that is the United States. Government sponsored service is cultural neo-liberalism at its finest.
The word service is a loaded word. It connotes many things, such as military service (“Were you ever in the service?”), community service (“She was sentenced to 30 days of community service.”), being of service to others, etc. It has also become a vogue word over the past 25 years; e.g., Service Learning (1995), etc. Its popularity and use arose and expanded in tandem with the privatization of social life, services, and the expansion of work for free, such as unpaid internships and articles like this for which this author receives no remuneration. I see it as part of the privatization and unpaid volunteer movement engineered by the elites in recent decades. This cult of the service volunteer…