I sat out Martin Luther King Day this year. Beyond Vietnam plays in my head plenty, as does his revulsion of the silent left*. The debates on social media were traps: would Martin be on the side of Israel or on the side of Palestine? Equipped with quotes of justification we reduce the genius of the man to a snapshot designed to serve our needs.
No I couldn’t urge the day of service this year. I wasn’t touched by Biden feeding the poor after serving up a speech marking 100 days of bombing Gaza – and only being able to talk about the hostages still held by Hamas, not a word about 24,000 Palestinian dead and counting.
No, I wasn’t able to scroll through the memes inviting us to our higher angels. One though, did catch my eye. It asked, “Will you live up to the quote you are posting today for the rest of the year?”
Martin paid for his wisdom. He took the hits and continued to follow his path of nonviolence. He refused to succumb to power and wrote some of his most important understandings inside the walls of jails. He watched as the friends deserted him for his too much caring for the poor or for victims of a rich man’s war.
They buried his work for years, thinking they might snuff out the humanity, the urgency, and the recognition that we had indeed gone to far into our materialism and too far from our hearts. I think people spend too much time pondering MLK and not enough time putting knowledge to task.
He showed us how to live; how to examine; how to be forthright and above all how to be human.
And now it is our turn. Who will we be?
- “History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”
let kindness win 