What judgment would Martin Luther King Jr. render if he were with us today? Lucky for us, we don’t have to face that. The great thing about dead heroes is that they can’t speak. The theologian and historian Vincent Harding quotes a poem by Carl Wendell Hines:
Now that he is safely dead Let us praise him build monuments to his glory sing hosannas to his name. Dead men make such convenient heroes: They cannot rise to challenge the images we would fashion from their lives. And besides, it is easier to build monuments than to make a better world. http://www.aril.org/king.html
But, of course, it doesn’t matter what King would say. It matters what we say, and -- as King always pointed out -- it matters what we do.
If you live in privilege, as I do, one thing is for sure: You haven’t done enough. I haven’t done enough. We haven’t done enough. If we had, this world would look very different than it does.
We all carry that burden, one that is more than we should have to face. In this world, it should be enough to just be a decent person -- to work hard, treat folks around us fairly, care for those we love. That’s difficult enough in a world full of disappointment, disease, and death. Just being an ordinary person is hard enough.
But at this moment in history, being decent in our private lives is not enough. There is too much at stake, and too little time to correct the course. We face crises on all fronts: Political, economic, cultural, and most dramatically, ecological. We cannot know how much time is left before destructive forces set in motion cannot be turned back. We should be scared, and that fear should motivate us.
King was scared. In the new book, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years 1965-68, Taylor Branch writes about how King was tired and struggling with depression in the last months of his life. I believe King understood how little time there was, not just for him but for us all.
So, we have to face what one writer has called “the long emergency.” There can be no illusions about the nature of the struggle required to create a different world, a world based not on domination but on a new communion among peoples. The choice still remains the one King asked us to face: “nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.”
Privilege makes it easy to hide, but soon there will be no hiding from the need to act. To turn from this knowledge of the world and its demands on those of us with privilege is to turn from the values of justice and equality that we claim to hold. Worse than that, it is to turn away from our own humanity. And if the call to justice, the yearning for our own humanity isn’t motivation enough, realize this: Soon, to hide will be to resign ourselves to that hell on earth that we are creating.
To act is to have faith, in ourselves and in the possibility that there is time. If King were alive today, we can be sure he would ask that of us. And we can look to King’s words on that April night in New York in 1967 for a reminder of what fate awaits us if we turn away:
“If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.”
If we act, there is no guarantee that we can make right all that has been torn asunder. We cannot wait for certainty, but must act out of love, with hope. It is through our action that we learn to love and feel hope. That action is the way we make love real in the world and find hope in our hearts.
I don’t pretend to know what King would say if he were alive today. I don’t know what analysis he would offer or what strategy he would propose. But he would certainly challenge all of us to act -- every one of us here today, everyone in this country, which has the opportunity to turn its power away from wealth and war, toward justice and peace. Whatever else King would say, he would say this:
Act. Now. Before the only path before us is that long, dark, shameful corridor, which ends at a door we should all pray is never opened.
Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. His latest book, All My Bones Shake: Radical Politics in the Prophetic Voice, will be published in 2009 by Soft Skull Press. He also is the author of Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007); The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege (City Lights, 2005); Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (City Lights, 2004); and Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (Peter Lang, 2002). Jensen's articles can be found online at http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/index.html.
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