Many have reacted to events of late as though we are in the End of Days. "Four years of darkness", said one friend. To which I replied, "Perhaps, perhaps not." I am trying to see us in these trying times, differently.
On January 18, thanks to another Facebook friend, I had an impromptu observation of the day, listening to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's 1968 Mason Temple address in support of the Memphis sanitation workers strike. To say I was impressed is an understatement.
First, let me say I am NOT drawing any equivalency between the social and political problems today and the historical arc of oppression of blacks removed from their native lands by the slave trade, raised in generations of bondage, freed from one oppression, only to be held down for generations by Reconstruction and Jim Crow. I get that. And this is the last time, as I try to develop these thoughts, that I will offer this disclaimer. I get that.
First, let me say I am NOT drawing any equivalency between the social and political problems today and the historical arc of oppression of blacks removed from their native lands by the slave trade, raised in generations of bondage, freed from one oppression, only to be held down for generations by Reconstruction and Jim Crow. I get that. And this is the last time, as I try to develop these thoughts, that I will offer this disclaimer. I get that.
Yet, there may be those who see this and say that I, an East Tennessee born white man, have no business appropriating Dr. King's legacy in the 21st century. But I disagree. I have just begun to look into his words and I am convinced that we would all be better served by finding the humility in these trying times to see if we could appropriate the God given wisdom in Dr. King's words.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wasn't just speaking contemporaneously, to black and white Americans of the day. He cast a vision of America that looked beyond that time out across history to future generations. To us, if we have ears to hear and eyes to see it.
King spoke of wanting the America on paper to live up to what was written there. He spoke of people with straight backs, who faced down dogs and fire hoses, and unthinking brutality to demand that America live up to its promise.
Like the Americans of the 20th century, we in the 21st century find ourselves confronted by a similar existential threat. There are still forces in society and in government who seek to divide us by economics and race, peddling a particularly regressive notion of ideological purity. Men and women of conscience and faith need to stand together to oppose this new oppression, not because "they're out to get us", but because we're people endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights. Because our great nation was founded upon the idea, and still exists today, because our founders believed "that all men are created equal."
Perhaps, instead of bemoaning what we think is lost, longing for the past, railing against the now and the future, we should rediscover these timeless truths that say who we are, a great nation of people possessed of confidence, courage, faith, and straight backs. People not willing to be railroaded, or bent to the will of a party or ideology.
Perhaps it's time to simply stand and proclaim:
We shall overcome
We shall overcome
We shall overcome some day
Deep in our hearts we do believe
That we shall overcome some day
