On Monday, it was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

I might have used “celebrated”, but that would be a stretch. We were far too focused on Richard Sherman’s WWE style promo cut on Erin Andrews following the NFC Championship to celebrate the life and work of Dr. King.

The vast majority of us sits and hides from the Polar Vortex, hitting the snooze button – or not even setting an alarm on this typically cold January Monday each year. Turns out, that makes quite the metaphor for our lives.

We have hit the snooze button one too many times.

The reasons are many, but mostly are due to the false sense of security we have about progress. Too many of us are oblivious to the problems we face, as a nation, as a society. The collective majority of us believe we are simply better than those generations before us.

While it may be true that we do not have many of the problems of the 1960s, we have the issues of today. And we are flat out ignoring them. In yet another call to arms and minds, this wonderful nation that could is quickly becoming a nation that can’t.

We can’t sustain this beast.

We can’t survive in political gridlock.

We can’t keep shooting each other with machine guns in schools.

We can’t keep striping away the fabric of our morality and rights by either vague posturing or blind ignorance.

We can’t live beyond our means for much longer.

But we can do so much more to improve our personal situations and those we call neighbors.

As I read some of the fantastic pieces commemorating Dr. King this week, I wondered: what would he think of the world now? Had he not been assassinated in 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. would be 85, no doubt an even bigger social, political and cultural icon for all that he would have accomplished in the 40-plus years since.

And it’s difficult to think about him without thinking of Bobby Kennedy, who was also assassinated in 1968. What might he have done had he lived? What would he think of the world now?

If we are honest, as interesting as it may be to speculate on such things, it really does not matter.

What matters is what we think of the world today.

What are we going to do to make it better?

If you actually study their measured words, Dr. King, and his contemporaries, truly transcended time and place. Their words are still relevant and important today. We just fail to heed them, listen to them, and implement them is all.

For example, let us return to Mr. Sherman, Seattle Seahawks cornerback and perhaps the best player at his position in the NFL. From the moment his amazing athletic feat occurred through today, we could run about a million different case studies of what still plagues us as a society.

We are a bit too obsessed with inconsequential things, like football and the famous. Far too many people cared about two teams from the West coast in the middle and eastern parts of this country. Sherman gained nearly 225,000 followers between the end of the game and Monday evening. My social media feeds were flooded with comments – mostly negative – about Sherman scaring Erin Andrews half to death.

We’re more prone to comment on something like Sherman’s outrage than we are on things like abortion, crime, or helping find homeless men, women and children shelter from freezing temperatures.

Why? Because if we ignore it long enough, we can pretend it is not there.

Everything is a personal choice or belief, therefore private, and in modern America, the private decisions and stances we have trump humility, human dignity and the betterment of our society. This is because most people do not want to have some other liberty infringed upon, so we willfully ignore others to save the ones we personally identify with.

But in the end, we all lose.

How does that relate to pro football? Simple – we can easily find common ground on the surface of any topic – like the fact Sherman seemed like a selfish, boastful jerk during the interview. But most will fall silent when we discuss a more substantive topic outside a sporting event or reality TV.

As Dr. King said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

King also said: “There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right.”

It might help if we knew what was right.

We seem to have forgotten grace, sportsmanship and humility. Sherman mocked the receiver he tipped the ball from, Michael Crabtree, who had, apparently, disrespected him. So, by all means, disrespect right back.

I cannot remember the last time I saw a tremendous play that the athlete who made it did not find it imperative to let the entire world (that just watched it) know what happened.

Why can we not let our actions speak for themselves? Maybe it has something to do with our lust for attention. Then again, it might be worth looking at what we do with the attention once we have it. Ask for the grand stage, and you must put on a grand show, right?

Dr. King’s thoughts: “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.”

And where do we stand during others times of challenge and controversy? We distance ourselves as quickly as possible.

A player caught cheating in sports: “I never liked the guy, always suspected he was a cheater.” Really? Interesting you never came out and said as much.

I’ll admit to liking Lance Armstrong during his years on top and being duped by Mark McGwire. It was believable, yet not. It was borderline heroic. And it was a lie. Now we know. But I cannot re-write history – and neither can you.

It probably says more about who you would stand next to during a controversy of theirs than what you would do during one of your own.

We give a pass for emotion in the moment. After the initial backlash on Sherman, there was a backlash to the backlash. I read far too many “don’t stick a mic in an athlete’s face in that environment” and “the media begs for crazy moments and then freaks when they get one” type comments.

Far too often and far too easily we give a pass to people for their reactions “in the heat of the moment.” We should hold people accountable for their actions, reactions and emotions. It is indeed the measure of a man. As it is the measure of our society. We all reacted in the same manner as Sherman did. Neither was appropriate or befitting.

Until we can get a grip on ourselves and acknowledge how far we still have to go – that the journey of personal and societal growth never ends, only evolves – then we will continue to struggle with the reality that we are losing everything we say we value.

WE must stop hitting snooze.

WE must stop wasting our collective time and societies time by passively participating and only engaging in the stuff that does not matter.

Maybe WE could do something to transcend time and place, where memories are not just words, but live in action.

“People fail to get along because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don’t know each other; they don’t know each other because they have not communicated with each other.” – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.