Approximately 2,000 years ago a gentleman made the rather radical suggestion that a good approach to violence might be to turn the other cheek, love your assailant and use his own humanity to shame him into doing the right thing. Many people agreed with this gentleman, and he founded a rather successful church. Of course, that bit about turning cheeks was really hopeless idealism, so most of the people who followed him thought better about it and continued to do a pretty good job of killing. Some 2,000 years later a man from India got the brainstorm that perhaps turning cheeks was not just hopeless idealism. Combining the whole turn the other cheek bit with some Indian philosophy, he did something remarkable and freed his country (and yes, they celebrated by killing each other, but to that point it did work). Today we celebrate the next man to have run with that idea. A brilliant orator, an idealistic visionary, and a determined realist, Martin Luther King nailed his ideas on to the American conscience and told us that we could not be free while we oppressed those around us. In his “Letter From A Birmingham Jail,” he told us that “ I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. 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. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial outside agitator idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.” That justice would not be timid, but it also would not be violent. It would be a clarion call to the conscience of a people who had dared to utter the phrase “All men are created equal” in their own Declaration of Independence. It would take two centuries but Martin Luther King’s call to conscience would shame a nation into taking action against the hypocrisy of saying all men are created equal but denying freedom to one group. Like his Indian forbearer and the other gentleman who preceded him, an act of martyrdom was required to finally break the chains definitively, but the time since Memphis has seen all the hypocrisies of our culture come to light. We have followed in the footsteps of that giant, and we are closer today to the ideal that “when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of Gods children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!” Today we celebrate his birthday and our own desire to “form a more perfect union.”
Posted on: Mon, 20 Jan 2014 18:59:57 +0000
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