We remember Martin Luther King, Jr. through his powerful speeches, his image, and the courage of his nonviolent convictions. But in the wake of the tragedy in Tucson, we should also remember the transformation of society that he enabled with his words and actions. Those who followed him did not let his death stop his dream. Today we need not shy away from the hard politics ahead, but remember King and change America.

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"No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin,

or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate,

and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love,

for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite."

~ Nelson Mandela ~

Each new generation inherits the past.   Part of our inheritance is material, as in the things of this earth that are made by us as well as the ideas and skill sets that created them.   Part of our inheritance is ecological, by which I mean the great good earth itself and all the diverse forms of life that grow and decay upon it as well as its mysteries, some as small as atoms and others as large as all eternity.   And part of our inheritance--probably the most elemental of all of what we inherit because knowledge of them and about them shapes everything we are and do--is contained in the historical and cultural narratives that teach us who and where we are, what we are about, and what we should learn to believe in.   Over time, these are the narratives we draw on to answer, one way or another, our questions about our place out here among the stars as well as what we should do, or must do, with our lives.

Today we celebrate the life and mourn the early death of one of the best of us, Martin Luther King, Jr.   We remember his speeches, recall his image, and think about his courage and his convictions.   His life and work, his story, is part of our national narrative inheritance.   So, too, are the memories we carry with us of his murder:   Of the image of an empty balcony on the second floor of a blue-tinged motel in Memphis; of Bono's words about "April 4th, shots ring out in the night."   Or of why we believe he came into our tortured world and what he accomplished for us while here, "in the name of love."

Much has been remembered of the gifts of his life and the tragedy of his death, but I think that both of those legacies speak to us differently this year.   By which I mean this year after Tucson .   By which I mean in this first month of a new year when once again the twin forces of extraordinary good and the banality of evil reveal themselves to be once again pumping as blood through the very heart of our nation.  

Once again we are reminded, as we learn more about the lives of the victims, that regardless of how good we are as a person or what we stand for, bad things can and do happen to the best of us.   That from wherever we live and breathe, it doesn't so much matter whether or not the violent surround of mediated politics and pundits were responsible for one man's rampage against reason.   What matters is death.   Sudden death.   Or being shot in the face at point blank range.   What we see, and fear in spite of ourselves, are the shattered lives of fellow human beings who, like us, got up on a Saturday morning without any inkling of what would become them.   And of what did.

Martin Luther King, Jr., some say, may have had a premonition of his own death.   His last speech, recorded earlier that day, seems to indicate it.   He said he had "been to the mountaintop" and he felt he knew what was on the other side.   And he said this:

"And then I got to Memphis. And some began to say the threats... or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers?"

"Sick white brothers," indeed.   Crazy.   Their actions are inexplicable, unless these shooters are, indeed, insane.

We cannot know the mind of the murderer of Martin Luther King, Jr., or of Jared Lee Loughner, at least not yet, but it seems to me that we too often find that blaming an unspeakable crime on a "nut job" is preferable to doing very much about it.   So, in the case of Loughner, instead of addressing the hard issues of mental health or gun laws, or holding those who advocate violence as a political remedy accountable for the sorry state of political rhetoric, it is easier for us as a people to listen to a fine presidential euology and then quietly forget the whole thing.  

In that quiet forgetting I am as guilty as you are.   I was surprised, for example, and my guess is that if you don't already know about it you are going to be surprised too, by the extent of American gun slaughter.   As Bob Herbert (via the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence) reminds us, over one million Americans have been killed or committed suicide with guns since 1968.  

If that statistic doesn't give pause to your reading, try this one, also from the Herbert article: "Excluding the deaths from 9/11, over 150,000 citizens have been murdered in the 21st century."   That's only the first ten years.   And admittedly that is murder of all kinds.  

But let's narrow it down a bit.   Since Jared Lee Loughner was born in 1988, there have been fourteen cases of "lone wolf" gunmen who committed acts of mass murder in these United States.   Fourteen .   In every case I can find, somebody somewhere said the shooter was a "nut job" and that we ought to do something about this kind of senseless violence by madmen with guns.  

But clearly we have not done anything much, if anything at all about murder in the United States.   Instead, during those twenty-two years funding for mental health has significantly declined and there are far more weapons of mass destruction, in the form of assault rifles and handguns useful only for killing lots of people fast, in the hands of our fellow citizens.   Have we quietly forgotten those fourteen cases or mass murder?   Or the over 150,000 murders overall?   I think the evidence is clear that we have.

So why would I mention these disturbing murder cases, or Jared Lee Loughner, in an article that recalls the excellent legacy of Dr. King?  

I do it because I remember.   I remember that as a young man I lived through the years that led up to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.   I lived through the "lone wolf" assassinations, or conspiracies as all of them might have been, in the killing of JFK, and then killing Bobby, and then killing Dr. King.   I remember that in each case the gunman was called "a nut job," whether that particular nut was alleged to be, as was Oswald, a Communist (and therefore a nut job because all Commies were, during the cold war, by definition, nut jobs); or he was, like Sirhan Sirhan, an anti-Israel Palestinian (and therefore a nut job because, at the time, most pre-global village Americans didn't give a tinker's damn about Jews and Arabs over there ); or he was, like James Earl Ray, Jr., a violent Southern racist nut job (because while racism was, in the late 1960s, largely becoming unfashionable throughout America, violent racists from the South were still thought to be a breed apart from the rest of the country, and therefore, adding regional insult to alleged injury,   just a bunch of redneck nut jobs).

We often label as crazy what we either don't understand.   We may never fully understand the motives of Oswald, or Sirhan, or Ray, Jr., if in fact it was any of those persons who was alone responsible for the assassinations we narratively associate with them.   That any of these lone wolves was inspired by the extremist political rhetoric of the times or was motivated to commit murder because of something they heard on the radio or watched on television or read in a book, well, who knows?   It is pretty clear that "the turbulent "60s" was an era of such talk.   But, again, who really knows?   If anything, these violent acts that were attributed to "nut jobs" only contributed further prejudice to a nation teeming with anti-Communist, anti-Palestinian/Arab, and/or anti-Southern racist sentiments.  

If anyone learned anything from arguing about the politics of these murderers, it was this: They were crazy and wrong and we are sane and right.   Please feel free to fill in whom you think "they" are/were and who "we" are/were.   "They" were crazy and wrong because "we" don't believe what they believe.   And of course we are right.   "They" were crazy because only crazy people put bullets into the heads of our leaders and representatives and they are wrong because "we" certainly wouldn't do that.   And why wouldn't we do that?   Because "we" don't believe that regardless of the vitriolic rhetoric that passes for political talk that any sane person would kill somebody because of it.   That would be just crazy.

Or maybe we just don't want to believe that unless crazy is the reason that such a heinous thing is possible.   Or that it is likely.

Yet there is a lot of evidence that suggests we must be crazy ourselves to think like that.   There is the evidence provided by the examples of Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan, James Earl Ray, Jr., and the fourteen shooters since 1988 that preceded the murderous rampage in Tucson.   If we imagine that words don't inspire actions, we are deluding ourselves.  

The question "did Loughner do what he did because of Rush, or Glenn, or Sarah" is the wrong question.   The raw fact is that there is a Rush, a Glenn, and a Sarah--as well as a host of others--calling for hate to replace reasoned debate and that is a far more relevant issue.   But in the same way that we don't expect mental health care to suddenly receive money or gun control laws to be enacted, neither do we really expect that politicians and pundits will "dial it down," or that political debates won't turn into shouting matches or filibusters.   Or that much will actually change.

That, too, is a choice we make.   That, too, is part of our narrative inheritance from assassinations past.   Not much changes.  

Unless it does.   Unless it is forced to change by the use of words and actions.   Without the application of rhetorical force to the problems at hand, history recedes into the past and life goes on.   We are sad, of course, but we get over it.   And without the hard work of passing legislation and improving funding to make possible progressive change, it won't happen.   But for some reason today we hope--somehow--that our capacity to feel sad somehow translates into a free pass not to do the hard work required for changes to occur.

Today we mark the life of a man who stood for and spoke eloquently about what we can do better, about the transformative power of nonviolent revolution, but we also should remember the hard work of others who turned his death into a cause for progressive changes.   Everywhere we will hear excerpts from Martin Luther King, Jr.'s finest hours as an American orator whose words inspired a political movement for change.   But it worthwhile to note that it is what happened after those speeches that transformed our society. We have an African-American president, a fact of our lives unimaginable in King's era.   The racism and bigotry of the past today seems exactly that--the remnant of a bad but bygone era.   That racism and bigotry still exist is undeniable, but it is far less tolerated anywhere in America, and for that we are better people.  

That progress was brought about not just by King's words, not just by our sadness at King's passing, but also by deeds done by him and by his followers.   By those of us who demanded that the dream he had became a reality.   It was created by the passage of laws that made it possible for black children to share schools with their white counterparts, for equal opportunity and protection from prejudice to redefine employment and housing and health care.   That enabled children of every race who grow up with less educational opportunities to attend college and not only that, but by assuring that once in college they have resources made available to them to help them succeed.   That lobbied for and passed legislation that made it possible for minority-owned and operated small businesses to flourish. And so on.

A few years ago I wrote a scholarly article about "narrative inheritance."   In it I discussed the negative effects of secrets in families and, by extension, the negative effects of secrets in free societies dedicated to democratic ideals.   One action implicates the other, because, just as no child is born into this world a racist neither are children born as keepers of secrets; in both cases, racism and secret-keeping--as well as million other inherited habits of mind and of action--are learned, and usually they are learned at home.   Inherited narratives are what we pass along to our children.

So it matters what we do in response to a tragedy.   When Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, the bad news was that riots broke out and cities burned.   But then came the good news: These days of rage were replaced by years of steady progress making the better world that King, and the Kennedys, envisioned.   Laws were passed, funding was free up, and a generation later, we can see that it is possible to change the world when inspired by our leaders.

Today, I hope we remember Dr. King.   I want us to remember not only his words and his actions, but the actions and words of those who followed him, for all those people whose names we don't know who worked for years for the changes he foretold.  

But I also want us to think about how we have allowed ourselves to become a people who no longer work for changes that are hard, for changes that take on powerful gun lobbies and hate speech advocates and those who do not believe that a government dedicated to the public good should also pay for health care, including mental health care, for its citizens.   I want us to rethink that common lack of commitment to change.   I want us to ask ourselves if that is the story, if that is the narrative, that we want to pass down to our children, and to our children's children?  

Because I don't think it is.   And I am pretty sure Martin Luther King, Jr. would agree with me.   Our narrative inheritance from him is one dedicated to making sure that fine words echo so loudly, and so long, that we have no choice but to act on them.   For that is the only way that progressive change happens.   If we really want it to.

Authors Bio:
H. L. (Bud) Goodall, Jr. lives in Arizona where he is a college professor and writer. He has published 20 books and many articles and chapters on a variety of communication issues. His most recent books include Counter-Narrative: How Progressive Academics Can Challenge Extremists and Promote Social Justice (Left Coast Press, 2010) and, with Jeffry Halverson and Steven R. Corman, Master Narratives of Islamic Extremism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) .