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!

Let's Delve into Two Thousand Twelve!

Hi there! To everyone who says that there's nothing that rhymes with 12, I say, "Suck it!" Suck my delve! I'm just kidding, but I just realized a few weeks ago that "delve" rhymes with "twelve." I just had to put that into a title of this post.

Now, onto the picture I have illustrated above. Last week, in the week between Christmas and New Year's Day, I traveled up to Nor Cal, specifically Santa Cruz, to my Dad's relative's place. Along the way, I spotted these rugged mountainsides just south of Santa Barbara. I took a picture, since I am a compulsive picture taker whenever I travel. Then I got the impulse to draw this.

Unfortunately, it took a while, and then got shelved underneath the other books I was working on at the time. However, I picked it up again today and completed it. That's the unfortunate nature of my drawing. For the last few years, I have had more and more priorities in my life, so even though I still draw, I have less time to devote to it. I love working with my hands, when it comes to this. When I am sketching, for a while, my mind is focused, but I don't feel any stress in this focus. I don't have to force it; it is just there. However, I often have to shelve (hey, something else that rhymes with "twelve") something for a few weeks or months, and then come back to it.

This picture below shows just a sample of the types of hillsides I was describing (just next to the 101 Highway, overlooking the beach).

Just for comparison's sake, here's my drawing again. See if they look alike.

So my point in following this impulse was to make a quick drawing (that didn't quite work), but also in doing a good landscape drawing, which I always love doing. I have always had a thing (a fetish, perhaps?) for sketching hillsides and mountains. I have always been fascinated with mountains, hills, slopes, cliffs, canyons and gulches as artistic subjects. So I have been doing sketches and detailed, color drawings of them for a long time.

Here are a few examples of some of the best ones I did in years past. This is one I did of the San Gabriel Foothills, just north of Arcadia, in 2007.

I spotted these from Santa Anita one late afternoon on a Saturday. I just happened to have my notebook with me, and I really wanted to do the late afternoon glow and brilliant shadows on the hills justice. I apologize for this photo still being turned sideways. I crop and rotate these photos in Picasa as soon as I upload them to this laptop, but that doesn't always show up when I go to put them in the text.

It was, of course, done quickly, so I didn't give it much detail. However, I think I got the texture accurately. Look, and see if you can find the brittle, dry-brush feel to the mountainsides with your eye. Admittedly, I did not go heavy on the shadows when I did this. It has taken me longer to make my shadows darker. My studio art teacher used to get on me about that. Speaking of rough drawings, here is one I decided to do while in up Lone Pine this past July, 2011.

Again, the Picasa edits I made didn't seem to compute here. You can see the tones of light better expressed in this one, though. Even though it was done in all of one evening, I did my darndest to capture that late afternoon, early evening glow that the sun casts. Challenging as that is, I love to draw it. I love that type of challenge. Speaking of this glow, I did one about three or four weeks ago, which was about that same light quality, and the shadows it casts.

There must be some trick I'm missing, here. It's been a while since I've used Blogger on a regular basis, so I am still getting used to using all its tools. As you can see, I have changed the blog's settings and appearance, and I am working on embedding videos properly, so that we don't have any more mishaps. I've got some pretty good ideas, so I'm gonna get all the kinks smoothed out.

Anyway, this one was even more rough than the one above it. I began putting the color down even before I had all the details laid out. That might not make sense to you, but to me, it is a big distinction. You have to understand that I used to be quite anal about putting in details, drawing them out very meticulously. I made a big risk of losing the visual details and texture of it by laying out grass in the field, and shadows on that hill.

I picked this because it was winter. The image in my mind of that time of year, December, winter, and Christmastime, was of this snow-dusted landscape. I have spent a lot of time in my drawings expressing the mental snap-shots that I get when I think of something. These aren't necessarily clear-cut or logical, but this is the image I saw in my minds eye when I thought of that time of year.

It comes from trips I used to take to my grandparents' house in Golden, Colorado, outside of Denver. A few times, we drove the whole way. We would always have to get up early, leaving at dawn. Along the way, we would have to drive past the mountains and valleys in Utah. I remember, when we went on this trip at Christmas three years ago, in 2008, the route was unusually covered with layers of snow.

I was taken by the qualities I saw in the scenery: the ruggedness, the cold air, the orange and yellow glow of the late afternoon, and yet, the warm familiarity to the scene. Even though this was a different time, it brought me in touch with my past and memories. These were the visual qualities I wanted to bring to the viewer in this work here.

My point in this drawing was not to make it look exactly like the photo, as it has been in past works. My point, as I explained above, was to communicate the visual feeling of what is in this image. Sometimes, I just want to show the physical texture to the scene, as I like to do with landscapes. Other times, I like to go deeper with my meaning. Especially with illustrations of people, there is often deeper meaning. Whether it is visual, physical, emotional, spiritual, or romantic depth, this has been a cornerstone of what I like to explore in my creative work.

Well, I feel really inspired, having finished that picture, and typed this post. In spite of the kinks with the photos, and embedding the videos, I feel really excited about the future of this blog. Like I said, I've got some really good ideas for artworks and posts brewing up. For instance, I went to the Occupy the Rose Bowl gathering yesterday, I'm working on a picture regarding that unique development, and I should have a good post for you sometime tomorrow night. I'm excited as to what this year holds for creative work in this blog. I have been excited to develop this blog and its spirit.

So see ya soon, and keep wondering, folks!