Martin Luther King, and the Courage of Imagination

People of the World,

I think this opening is especially appropriate, given our task today. Anyway, today marks the 83rd anniversary the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Above is the "I Have a Dream" speech, a landmark in U.S. history. We've taken this day, this monday in January, off, for every year since 1986. To many people, this first holiday after the holiday season is just a "day off," or another day at work. In the past few years, though, I have attempted to keep a few things in my heart and my mind as I go through my daily activities today.

From a young age, I was bothered by problems in the world. When I was about 15, I began feeling this pit of despair about the human condition. I worried that maybe those dark forecasters of the future, and of human nature were right after all. What if all people only cared about themselves, in the primal sense? Maybe we were all just in it for our own power, survival, and primal drives. My fear was, Did that mean people who cared about others were just deluding themselves? This was what the fear seemed to be saying to me. This was the worst possibility of all. After having read 1984 at that age, I was determined not to let this happen, not to give in to my own primal urges.

Ever since then, I've been looking for people to model my life, and my mission, after. This mission is in part a political one, and in part a psychological and sociological one, a mission of the self. The people that have remained as icons for me are people like Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, in the most grand sense. To me, it is their great senses of both compassion, and justice, the longing for freedom, and for unity. Allow me to clarify.

Both were opposed to war and institutionalized violence, whether it be of the police, or the public at large. This is something I came to identify early on in life as critical for a complete moral code. They also refused to allow oppression of any sort, by whichever party may be perpetrating it. That spoke to me in a big way. Even though I considered myself kind, and caring of people, I could not tolerate wrongs. I did not want to "learn to live with" oppression, slavery, war, despotism by government, or despotism by corporation.

Right after Osama Bin Laden was killed last May, many people were seen to write, as their Facebook statuses, a quote from Rev. Dr. King that read thusly: "Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoit of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that." In class, a few days later, some girl remarked, in my argumentation lecture, why she dissed that comment, "I don't think somebody who wanted rights for black people would say that about a terrorist like Bin Laden."

That comment just really got on my nerves. Here's why it pissed me off. It was not just the ignorance of King, the not knowing (some people just don't know that much about history), but the refusing to know better, the refusal to just listen. In that moment, she was just saying "I don't know what that's about, so I'm just gonna piss all over it." What really made me bonkers about it, personally, was that Martin Luther King was about so much more than just "rights for black people."

King really knew how and when to speak truth to power. People were telling him and other civil rights crusaders that, as his colleague, Rev. Joseph Lowery put it, "It is not the appropiate time." I have observed that people say that often in politics. One thing I would ask them is a simple question in the Zen tradition: "If not now, when?" If you watch the speech above, one part of it is about " The Fierce Urgency of Now." "Now is the time!" That is even more true today than it was back when those words were delivered.

Anyway, in actual fact, Martin Luther King went much further in his social action than just civil rights for the black community. Listen to the speech he gave named "Beyond Vietnam," at Riverside Church in New York on April 4, 1967.






In this speech, he talked about the other side of the Vietnam Conflict, the one that Americans rarely talk about. Namely, that the U.S. had collaborated with France to keep their claim on Vietnam. The only problem with this game-playing, as well as similar games played in Iran, Guatemala, and other places, was that the good of the country's people was not regarded. They did not get the chance to fight, struggle and work it out in their countries. The leaders of the two superpowers dictated their destinies, and the people were forced to comply. We only talked about "freedom and liberty" for them in vague, glowy terms, but first, we kept our own gains on the line. Tellingly, he finished with a JFK quote, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

Martin Luther king was also aware of the economic nature of this struggle for not just civil rights, but freedom, dignity, humanity, the humanity of black, white and all other races. In the I Have a Dream speech, he decried specifically a country in which "a negro in Alabama cannot vote and a negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote." Look at where this country is now. This sense that people can do nothing about our future now haunts us like the pall of impending catastrophe in some horror movie.

One poll I looked at (I forget which one) said that 5% of the public currently believes that Congress is doing a good job. That speaks for itself. As I mentioned before, the poverty rate has been increasing rapidly in the last six years. While I was researching that, I saw stats that showed there were many more children in homelessness. I have also begun hearing that hunger is becoming a big problem for people in this country. Not just in the third world, but in the United States, there are people who are going hungry (See here and here). When Dr. King was assassinated, he was rallying at a garbage workers' strike in Memphis.

Today in America, race relations still amount to a series of volatile fault lines. The most hairy of these is the white-black divide. All you have to do is say the wrong word, or make an ill-thought-out comment, and presto, you've ignited a centuries-old clash. They feel that guttural sting of racism, that weight on their dignity. Then when you get the heat, you feel wrongly blamed for some racist sin you didn't commit. This can make for an awkward and tense coexistence. Poor bastard, you were just trying to make some clever comment, now you've hit below the belt.

What formed this old clash comes from the simple history of slavery. This gets to the key of the meaning of MLK Day. Dr. Cornel West wrote on the history of the utterly dehumanizing slave trade. He observed that the Africans had been abducted, taken for weeks in ships that festered with brutality and diseases, in which many slaves died and were thrown into the Atlantic Ocean. Once in the Americas, they were stripped of any social worth, and essentially, any humanity they had, in the brutality with which they were treated. Now, they were not the only ones to have this happen, but it has happened. Even today, if you're black, you're more likely to be unemployed, poor, looked at with suspicion, and beaten up by the police.

This robbing of humanity needs to be addressed. But how do we address it? I don't pretend to have any answers. However, I do know that we need to use our creativity. This is what I mean by the courage of imagination. We need to be forthright enough with ourselves to imagine a different world, to question that which we are told is gospel, and doubt not just when people say what is possible, but when people tell you what is impossible. Imagination means that you proclaim your freedom, and then honor the dignity of others.



Van Jones, a former Green Jobs advisor to the Obama Administration, lays out what this means beautifully here. It is an injustice that he was expelled from said administration, simply because he had explored extreme-left politics 20 years ago. Meanwhile, senior members at Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, et. al., continue to work as Obama's advisors. What Jones did here that I want to see more of is talk about freedom. In this country, we are given a very narrow definition of what freedom is. Usually, it is just a code word to promote nationalistic saber-rattling and the allowing of corporate dominance. Sadly, freedom and liberty have become meaningless feel-good phrases used by the power-brokers.

Martin Luther King knew what freedom meant. Freedom does require a struggle, but not just a physical battle. It may mean a struggle with your peers, your family, your spouse. Sometimes it means being marginalized, cut out socially. Freedom and peace are seen as static states to many, but I believe they are much more active. As King said, so beautifully, "Peace is not the absence of conflict, it is the presence of justice." Thankfully, because of this overwhelming sense of desperation in this country, there is more willingness for people to live honestly, live truthfully, to refuse to be part of old patterns. Now, this type of change can be perilous, being largely an unknown, but we have seen the shortfalls of conventional doctrines, ways of living, and our lives are shifting. Let us see where this takes us.

See ya, and keep wondering, folks!