'Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.... Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.' –Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community, Martin Luther King
I have pretty much ignored Martin Luther King day today, other than to note that I wouldn't get mail today, and several businesses I needed to contact would be closed. That was it. I had zero plans to write about it. And you will notice that most of OS has passed, other than Sally Swift's great post, Dr King Still Has The Power To Heal Us.
But as I watch my usual 3 hours of weekday MSNBC politicking, an MLK clip came up on The Last Word that struck something in me, something meaningful to my life right now. I didn't remember the wording just after it was aired so I rushed to the computer and found instead the quote above. Powerful and so relevant to the post-Tucson political furor.
It seems almost that the timing of the shooting just before the King holiday is a signal, a beacon. There has been an eloquent voice for peace, a leader who can take us through the deeper darkness. Maybe we should be listening to him more closely, on this day to honor him. He lived through violence against him and his movement and experienced personally the lowest expression of humanity. And he still embraced peace and unity. And he repeated that message, over and over, up till the day he became a victim of violence.
“Let no man pull you low enough to hate him.”
We need his words more than ever. The same gutter hatreds are spewing, just new ethnic groups have been added as targets. Maybe the country didn't listen to King enough during the days he was alive. But we had had transformative leaders then, and we knew it - JFK and RFK for instance, just before they were gunned down. LBJ was a powerful leader too. Where are our transformative leaders now, willing to stand up for peace? Most of them are busy stirring up divisiveness. Obama has tried, but he's still too methodical, too bound to baby steps, and he has powerful, monied opponents. Just like MLK did. It remains to be seen if Obama will be able to rise to that transformative standard.
"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. "
It's hard to have anything or anyone to believe in these days. Personally, I don't trust anyone in government other than those few liberals like Kucinich and Feingold that have been marginalized and ignored. But they aren't the leaders we need right now. Maybe Martin Luther King's time has come; his words certainly strike true. He has something to say about our world, back from his grave.
"We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. And history is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. "
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Comments
My cable is turned back on now obviously, and what I learned most from MSNBC is that they talk constantly about the right, on and on ad nauseam, not just about what they're doing, but about what they are saying, and not just about the politicians, but the talk radio people. Honestly, we do need someone like MLK to stand up for what is the right thing to do, not just to point out the bad. You hear all of this bad news and you want to say what can we DO about it? No answers, and yet there are victories being won by progressives. I also don't care about Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin or Rush, or any of those people, but I do care about the people pulling the strings, the Kochs, and how to confront them. I wish the left would spend more time talking about those kinds of things than these other people, who are just dying for attention, and they get it. Even from the left. But I do like Lawrence O'Donnell. See you're back there, and I'm out here, and yet great minds think alike.
I am glad to read them.
This country is offering up no hope, either. Just as it was in the 60s and 70s, no one is listening, no one is leading. I commented on another post that I still believe, and I do, but I'm not infrequently despairing....
I think what spoke to me from the video clips and quotes by MLK is his steadfastness in the face of hatred and violence directed at him and his beliefs. I think liberals have something to learn from that. We know that our path - equal rights for all, fairness, justice and mercy - is right, even though our current leaders want us to "moderate" and compromise our expectations. MLK never did that, and he never expressed hatred or bitterness, even though he likely felt it more deeply than we do now. Yes, we have liberal media voices now, but for the most part, they are in retaliation mode. We need someone to be our leader in constant hope and constant struggle and we need to keep "our eyes on the prize."