King day again, with all of its reminders

Upheaval after upheaval has reminded us that modern man is traveling along a road called hate, in a journey that will bring us to destruction and damnation. Far from being the pious injunction of a Utopian dreamer, the command to love one's enemy is an absolute necessity for our survival. Love even for enemies is the key to the solution of the problems of our world. Jesus is not an impractical idealist: he is the practical realist.

- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., "Loving Your Enemies" sermon, collected in Strength to Love.

"I took a crushed cigarette out of his hand. He didn't want kids to see him smoke."

- Rev. Billy Kyles, who was on the balcony with Martin Luther King Jr. when King was shot.

I saw that quote last night during a documentary about King's death, from an assassin's bullet, on April 4, 1968. Kyles took the pack of cigarettes from King's pocket, too. He's kept them to this day.

And it struck me: Everyone's just a person.

Let this affirmation be our ringing cry. It will give us the courage to face the uncertainties of the future. It will give our tired feet new strength as we continue our forward stride toward the city of freedom. When our days become dreary with lov-hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe, working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.
- Martin Luther King Jr., Where do we go from here?

From The Telegraph archives.

Your daily King

I finished "Where do we go from here?" last night, and have much to share. But, unfortunately, The Macon Telegraph does not pay me to type up a bunch of Martin Luther King quotes and offer comment on them.

But I do want to share this:

I learned a lesson many years ago from a report of two men who flew to Atlanta to confer with a civil rights leader at the airport. Before they could being to talk, the porter sweeping the floor drew the local leader aside to talk about a matter that troubled him. After fifteen minutes had passed, one of the visitors said bitterly to his companion, "I am just too busy for this kind of nonsense. I haven't come a thousand miles to sit and wait while he talks to a porter."

The other replied, "When the day comes that he stops having time to talk to a porter, on that day I will not have the time to come one mile to see him."

When I heard this story, I knew I was being told something I should never forget.

MLK, Boyz in the Hood, Iraq, Alexis de Tocqueville and Doonesbury

If it's not already obvious, I'm reading several books by Martin Luther King right now, and I'll just quote them all day long:

Ultimately a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus. I said on one occasion, "If ever Negro in the United States turns to violence, I will choose to be that one lone voice preaching that this is the wrong way." Maybe this sounded like arrogance. But it was not intended that way. It was simply my way of saying that I would rather be a man of conviction than a man of conformity. Occasionally in life one develops a conviction so precious and meaningful that he will stand on it til the end. This is what I have found in nonviolence.
- Martin Luther King, Where Do We Go From Here?, 1967

Boyz in the Hood was on Saturday night and, during the scene where Cuba Gooding Jr's friends are arrested for the first time, I wondered: Why don't we teach non-violence in kindergarten and elementary school?

I'm not talking about Jesus or other religions, most of which teach that love is the most powerful force in the universe. I'm talking about the political force that has enacted more positive change in this world than any other, without firing a shot.

I also thought to myself: Maybe if whites had been made to live as blacks for a few years in the 1950s the civil rights movement would have chugged along a little faster, but that's kind of irrelevant.

Back to King:

This is not to imply that the Negro is a saint who abhors violence. Unfortunately, a check of the hospitals in any Negro community on any Saturday night will make you painfully aware of the violence within the Negro community. By turning his hostility and frustration with the larger society inward, the Negro often inflicts terrible acts of violence on his own black brother. ...

Therefore I must oppose any attempt to gain our freedom by the methods of malice, hate, and violence that have characterized our oppressors. Hate is just as injurious to the hater as it is to the hated. Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and east away its vital unity.

And from an earlier portion of the book:

During a nonviolent demonstration for voting rights, the sheriff had directed his men in tear-gassing and beating marchers to the ground. The nation had seen and heard, and exploded in indignation. In protest, Negroes and whites marched fifty miles through Alabama. ... The Voting Rights Bill of 1965 was the result. ...

Mass marches transformed the common man into the star performer and engaged him in a total commitment. Yet nonviolent resistance caused no explosions of anger - it instigated no riots - it controlled anger and released it under discipline for maximum effect.

I know at least one person who would disagree with that, but I wasn't there in the 1960s, so I can't say.

I can point out a similarity between the King's nonviolent movement and the concept of civil disobedience, described here by Alexis de Tocqueville:

When I refuse to obey an unjust law, I do not contest the right of the majority to command, but I simply appeal from the sovereignty of the people to the sovereignty of mankind.

I can also wonder whether this same strategy, combined with a nearly limitless ability for forgiveness, could solve the problems in the Middle East. In fact, I wonder if it might be the only thing that will solve those problems.

By the way, this was yesterday's Doonesbury in The Telegraph:

MLK and 9.11

For some reason, you can get in a lot of trouble in this country by suggesting that the normal laws of cause and effect may have been in play when Islamic terrorists attacked this country on Sept. 11, 2001.

Or, to put it another way, that United States policy may have helped lead to that terrible day.

So let me go ahead and admit that, when I read this quote last night from Martin Luther King Jr.'s book "Where do we go from here":

Cries of black power and riots are not the causes of white resistance, they are the consequences of it.

I wrote "9/11?" as a note to myself in the margin. Please, no one tell Rudy Giuliani. A buddy of mine and I were drinking and talking a couple of months ago, and he said something that I thought was so well-put and simple that I wrote it down:

Let's just maybe stop and think for a second. ... Maybe something that we've done in the past is encouraging this behavior. ... The CIA knows about blowback.... If you piss somebody off, it's gonna cause a hatred. Doesn't mean it's your fault but tell me that doesn't mean s#@$. ... And of course if we leave (Iraq) that's another @#$% you.

Well put. And while I'm sounding like an unAmerican pinko coward of a commie anyway, let me share this quote, from the same King book, which King attributed to former federal Office of Economic Opportunity director Hyman Bookbinder:

The poor can stop being poor if the rich are willing to become even richer at a slower rate.

I'm not sure that's true. But if it is, we should get on that.

No. No. We are not satisfied.

So you can just watch this on YouTube now. Amazing.


There are quite a lot of them online, in fact. This is just a snippet of King's final speech, made the day before he was killed:

Murder in the Cathedral

Where Cathedral = Super Dome and Murdered = Colt Brennan...

Not really. I read T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral over my vacation. And, yes, stuff like this is why my friends all make fun of me.

But there was plenty of wisdom to be found:

The peace of the world is always uncertain unless men keep the peace of God.

Every day is the day we should fear or hope from. One moment weighs like another. Only in retrospection, selection, we say, that was the day.

You think me reckless, desperate and mad. You argue by results, as this world does, to settle if an act be good or bad. You defer to fact. For every life and every act consequence of good and evil can be shown. As in time results of many deeds are blended so good an evil in the end become confounded.

There's another Eliot stanza, from The Wasteland, that is one of my favorites:

The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed

That, I think, is pretty self-explanatory. I would say it is my favorite quote. Perhaps I will add it to my facebook page.

As for the passage about being "reckless, desperate and mad," I figure it like this: If a pretty sizeable portion of the population doesn't think you're at least a little bit $*^#ing crazy, then you're probably doing it wrong. In fact, I don't think I've convinced enough people that I'm crazy, so that's my New Year's resolution: Stop not doing things that people tell me are crazy.

Clear enough? Excellent. I'll close with Martin Luther King Jr., who has a birthday coming up. He was writing as if he were the apostle Paul addressing Americans in the 1960s:

American Christians, I must say to you what I wrote to the Roman Christians years ago: "Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind." You have a dual citizenry. You live both in time and eternity. Your highest loyalty is to God, and not to the mores or the folkways, the state or the nation, or any man-made institution. ... In a time where men are surrendering the high values of the faith you must cling to them, and despite the pressure of an alien generation reserve them for children yet unborn. You must be willing to challenge unjust mores, to champion unpopular causes, and to buck the status quo. You are called to be the salt of the earth. You are to be the light of the world.

And you have heard that it was said

For some time now I've been working on an essay about the difficult necessity of turning the other cheek, and how violence begets violence.

There are a lot of drafts. As if I could improve upon the book of Matthew, or the teachings of a thousand wise philosophers.

I'm reading a book now called "Strength to Love." It's a collection of some of Martin Luther King Jr's sermons. I recommend it. I'm going to excerpt here from a sermon called "Loving your enemies."

There is so much hate in this world. I don't know much, but I know you can't fight it with hate.

Probably no admonition of Jesus has been more difficult to follow than the command to "love your enemies." Some men have sincerely felt that its actual practice is not possible. It is easy, they say, to love those who love you, but how can one love those who openly and insidiously seek to defeat you? Others, like the philosopher Nietzsche, contend that Jesus' exhortation to love one's enemies is testimony to the fact that the Christian ethic is designed for the weak and cowardly, and not for the strong and courageous. Jesus, they say, was an impractical idealist.

In spite of these insistent questions and persistent objections, this command of Jesus challenges us with new urgency. Upheaval after upheaval has reminded us that modern man is traveling along a road called hate, in a journey that will bring us to destruction and damnation. Far from being the pious injunction of a Utopian dreamer, the command to love one's enemy is an absolute necessity for our survival. Love even for enemies is the key to the solution of the problems of our world. Jesus is not an impractical idealist: he is the practical realist.

The sermon goes on to delve into the difficulties and practicalities of forgiving an enemy. I found it very enlightening. And depressing, because I can't see most people actually doing it. Is our country not now engaged upon a war of vengeance?

I'll excerpt a bit more. Dr. King was speaking primarily of the civil rights movement, but the words speak to so much more. And the "non-cooperation clause," so to speak, leaves room for physical force to protect the people, and the right, when they need protecting. It would appear that I am not a complete pacifist.

Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction. So when Jesus says "Love your enemies," he is setting forth a profound and ultimately inescapable admonition. Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies - or else? ...

To our most bitter opponents we say: "We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws, because non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. ...

Jesus is eternally right. History is replete with the bleached bones of nations that refused to listen to him. May we in the twentieth century hear and follow his words - before it is too late.