By Odeisel

“Everybody want to be King till you standing on the balcony with holes in your dream” –Jay-Z

This line never made it to a Jay-Z album. It was from a freestyle on his comeback tour a few years ago. But it speaks volumes about the mind state of demagogues and leaders in the post-King era. Everybody wants to be a leader. Everybody wants the adoration and the attention. But how many people are willing to truly pay the price?

43 years ago on that balcony at the Lorraine Motel, a man paid the ultimate price of leadership. In the time since, his image has been coopted for a world of dreamers who never connect that you have to get up off your ass and work in order for a dream to become a reality.

We dream about peace and dream about better things, on various levels of importance. Dr. King wasn’t a dreamer. He was a doer. He wasn’t stopped by gobs of spit running down his face or bricks hurled at him or a letter opener to the chest. Truth be told his work didn’t stop with bullets on the balcony. But none of that would be possible if Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t willing to pay the price.

As we get older, and the distance between now and the Civil Rights Era increases, how many people are left that are paying that price? Last week we lost another one. Professor Manning Marable spent the last two decades attempting to change all that we knew about Malcolm X. The definitive words would seem to have come from Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Marable, knowing Haley’s background as running far to the right of Malcolm and antithetically opposed to what Malcolm stood for, decided that he would dig deeper.

Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention is scheduled to be released today and will in all likelihood stand as both Marable’s magnum opus and perhaps the definitive word on Malcolm. Marable interviews people close, and examines files  and actually takes a look at chapters of the “autobiography” that were left out by Haley in the final manuscript, which was turned in without Malcolm’s approval.

Marable’s loss is a huge one, but muted by his relative anonymity in the popular zeitgeist. We’re already at a point in society where Snooki is worth more to talk at a school than a Nobel Prize winner. One by one, slowly but surely, we are losing the people who are willing to pay the price, without much thought about who will be counted to replace them.

It will come to a point where we’re all on that balcony, wishing for brighter tomorrows and day dreaming our asses off. And the things we wish against are locked and loaded; ready to put all that we aspire to and push for as a collective in the dust. At that point we have to be able to count on those are willing to push forward and see that what is broken should be fixed. How many of us that live on that balcony are still willing to pay that price? In this day in age, inflation may have pushed that cost too high for our shallow pockets.

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