"Evil Is Not the Totality of Who We Are as Persons"

Yesterday, we watched one of the Sunday political shows on TV before we headed to church.  I stitched a bit while listening to people argue over each other on TV.  I thought about how different this TV medium is from my usual news delivery source, NPR, sometimes on the radio, sometimes by way of internet.

My thoughts also turned to Martin Luther King, who was born on January 15, yesterday his true birthday.  I wrote a blog post about it yesterday morning, so it was on my mind.  I thought about how unlikely it was that he would get a federal holiday dedicated to him, such a short time after his death.  I marveled at the fact that I was alive when it happened, and how much further away we are from his death.  Now he has a monument in the heart of the nation's capital, so for many people growing up today, he seems like a mythic figure, not someone who walked the earth not very long ago.

Today I am listening to this episode of The Ezra Klein Show, a deep dive into King's thoughts with Brandon Terry.  For me, it's a great way of celebrating this holiday.  I am visiting my parents, so it doesn't feel safe (in terms of respiratory disease) to gather in large groups, working close together to do works of social justice.  It will be too cold to go to a parade.

It's interesting to think about King's trajectory.  In his lifetime, he did substantial work to reshape the nation into one that is more just.  Most of us will admit that there is still work to do.  When I was young, before there was a national holiday, we read his work in school.  Granted, it was often the work that was shorter and easier to understand.  Now we read his work in one or two sentence memes that circulate on social media.

Maybe it's better than not hearing these ideas at all.  But his work was so much deeper, and as I look around me, it's clear that most people have not done this level of deep thinking about the risks of violence, the benefits of non-violence, the best way to live a life in an empire that doesn't care if you die and in fact, may prefer you dead to alive.

I feel like we once did more of that, both as individuals and as a society, but perhaps it seemed that way to me because I was a college student, where more of us were wrestling with these questions.  In an ideal world, I'd be able to find this kind of questioning community in a church, but that's not always the case.

I am listening to this podcast (the one I mentioned above), which mentions his darker days, the ones where some of his allies abandoned him for his stance on the Vietnam War, where he was drinking more.  I imagine that many of us don't know this side of King, and I wonder if we might have more forgiveness of ourselves, along with more strength to persevere, if we knew of this.  King's trajectory is often taught as if his wins were a sure thing, much the way that those signers of the Declaration of Independence were sure to win.  But those wins were very much not a sure thing.  It's astonishing that anyone who has fought for a more just world has had any win at all--the forces of empire are very strong, and they are not forces easily bent to justice.

I am grateful that we have this holiday, even if its one that is easily manipulated in ways that King would not appreciate, in ways that many of us wish would be different.  It is good to be reminded that  those of us working to bend the arc of the moral universe to justice may not see the work done in our lifetimes--indeed, almost certainly, we will die, and there will still be work to be done.  It is good to be reminded "that evil is not the totality of who we are as persons" (Brandon Terry's words)--or as a society.