Toward the Beloved Community....

It is a vitality, in short, which allows you to believe,

to act on the belief, that it is your country, and

your responsibility to your country is to free it,

and to free it you have to change it.

- James Baldwin, "What Price Freedom?"

in Randall Kenan, ed.,

The Cross of Redemption (2010)

Whenever life seems so/too challenging, I find myself retreating back into my twin safe harbors and in their succor I find the strength and courage to re-emerge to fight the battle anew.  This realization has dawned slowly, something that I appreciated dimly a decade or two ago but that blazes bright now.  My twin safe harbors are the wisdom, inspiration and profundity of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and James Baldwin.  The latter inflames me with both a clarity of grievance and a spirit of contest while the former grounds me in the oh so difficult need to channel this effort of redress in a proactively engaged, non-violent and, even harder, loving way.

As I survey what intuitively strikes me as the decline of the American civilization, I feel the need for their succor right now ... and I am mindful that despite the difficulty, I am called to contest for right by taking the much harder high road, as challenging as that may be.

So, I've picked up King again and begun to read and be re-educated and inspired.  And I've picked up Baldwin again to be called to be more incisively observant and trenchantly expressive.  So here goes....

I really do believe that we are experiencing the end of the American Era, led by a person so unworthy that I cannot speak his name.  He is the living embodiment of virtually all of the -isms that continue to plague our country and, as such, is indeed the Ugly American.  And yet he's less to blame than we are: it is us who elected him and gave him the most powerful role in the world without his having any meaningful preparation (and yet somehow we're still serially surprised and appalled that he continues to manifest our fears in an ever-devolving way...).

Now, I know that some of you will object by saying that 'we' didn't elect him, but we - as in all of us - did: he won the Electoral College, which has been a part of our electoral system for eons.  That it's malfunctioned harmfully a couple of times in this century is just a reminder that we've tolerated it and exposed ourselves to this risk for too long.  No, I didn't vote for him, nor, I suspect, did most of you who will ever read this piece ... but he did garner enough votes in the right places to win the election, which makes him the legitimate POTUS even if he's not legitimately qualified to be so and reminds us of this in ever demoralizing ways every day.

Until we rise up to change our system - knowing as we have for centuries that the Electoral College was a mechanism tinged in human bondage - then we cannot complain about it when it doesn't work the way some of us want.  As with the rest of life, you can't support something as long as it works for you and then decry it when it doesn't.

And reforming our electoral system - or making any other meaningful and needed change - won't be easy in this age of Citizens United, gerrymandering, resurgent inhumanity and willful ignorance.

As I reflect on this reality, I am less angered than awed by it, made weary by the contemplation of the road ahead ... and then angered again because it feels like so many of the battles to be fought were won years ago and undone by the cravenly powerful during my lifetime/on our watch.

So back to King and Baldwin I go....

In The Radical King, Cornell West's finely curated survey of MLK's prophecy, I am reminded again of one of the signs of our demise: as much as we supposedly venerate the man - including by having his birthday become a national holiday - even more than this we eviscerate his message.  In a word, Dr. King's been whitewashed in modern America, hailed as a hero for contesting injustice in our past and then left there, as if our collective and purposeful forgetting justifies the lie that his message isn't even more urgent in this - and every - day.

MLK's day isn't past, our collective will to seek justice is....

And in all of its forms: political, electoral, economic, ecumenical, etc.  Frankly, we allowed ourselves to become horrified - mostly from the comfort of our couches on the sidelines of the fray - as meaningful victories were overturned in the courts, which were once our place of solace and deliverance but have lately become yet another of our oppressors far too frequently.  Think about it: we've seen the Voting Rights Act gutted with SCOTUS's endorsement in an age where an all too real and craven voter suppression effort has disenfranchised millions in both the South and the North.

Did we march and advocate and resist when this occurred?  A bit, but, honestly, not much.  And years later, after other previously unimaginable losses - like the appalling Citizens United ruling - we seem surprised that our predicament is so utterly bad.  Really?!?  Truth be told, we were tired of fighting and have now come to understand the ultimate cost of our lack of vigilance over time: to be ruled, as Plato pointed out in his timeless Republic, by "someone worse" than ourselves.  Apparently, we now realize (much too late), citizenship is a continuous contact sport....

And the forces of evil have become so much stronger, right?  Actually, no.  Emboldened by their string of significant victories of late, they're just less covert.

There has always been class warfare in our society, but only now are the (largely) 'Publicans in Congress unashamed to be so transparent in doing the plutocrats' - and only their - bidding.  How else can one describe either of the two travesties of proposed tax 'reform' bills currently on the Hill?  When many if not most in the middle class will actually see their federal taxes rise as those of the plutocrats plummet and teachers can no longer deduct the supplies that they shouldn't have to buy for their kids in the first place but the privileged will get a break for garaging their private jets, you know something is seriously, abominably wrong.

And racists have always been here in our society - even after the modest gains of the civil rights era - but with an equivocator in chief to encourage them, they now feel free to let the rest of us know that we're the problem.  That they can be so blinded by race-based hate not to be able to see that the puppeteers who've pulled the strings in ways that have materially damaged not only their lives in the short run but their life prospects in the long run look just like them and not the other oppressed folks who are the target of their often deadly ire is one of the most damningly inconceivable and enduring facets of our current demise.

And the list of sexual harrassers runs throughout history.  The real surprise is why we are surprised: we elected an acknowledged harrasser to lead us and we're shocked by the revelation that there are more - many, many more - in positions of power who're being outed now?  Really?!?  More like we were willing to tolerate 'a little hanky panky' 'cause it's better than in the old days only to find out that it hasn't been better and that, en masse, actual lives have been scarred, maimed and in some tragic cases ended by the abuse.  (Pogo proven damningly right yet again.)

Etc.

And yet the Reverend King insists that, as Jesus commanded, I/we must love those who oppress us and be willing to continue to suffer - and likely suffer even more as we resist and advocate forcefully for a new more inclusive and equitable order - and seek to transform them through soul force rather than physical force.

Even though I want to call "Bullshit!" on this quite forcefully, in my heart of hearts I know that he's right: in what universe can the dispossessed ever topple the mighty by practicing violence against those who control the largest cache of weapons known to mankind?  Sure, it feels good - empowering, even (at least in theory) - to say that we'll arm and protect ourselves, but, in reality, we'll never have enough guns to withstand the collective power of law enforcement and the military ... which is something that our fringe Alt-Right brothers haven't quite seemed to be able to figure out either.

(And if we need any more proof, let's reflect on the lesson of the Black Panther Party: no, the powers that be didn't like it that they were actually serving the community in ways that the government was not but should have been, but the pretext that allowed the latter to exterminate them was the former's embrace of guns, supposedly in the context of self-defense.  Funny, but a government sniper can't tell if you're brandishing your rifle for self-defense or armed overthrow of the established order, but s/he can use this as a reason to keep blasting until the question is no longer relevant.  Let's face it folks, an armed revolution it will not and cannot ever be.)

So, nonviolently forward we go, but utilizing every arrow in our quiver consistently and forcefully, especially those that didn't exist in MLK's day, like Social Media.  If a better world really is important to us, then we need to advocate proactively, both by engaging with and demanding more from our elected leaders as well as holding them accountable by voting.  Simply put, there is no excuse for not exercising the right to vote that was so dearly won a half-century ago and has been under siege ever since: voting will take you an hour or two a year (or perhaps significantly longer in areas where the suppression is much stronger [and thus even more in need of redress]), but the consequences of failing to do so last for years and sometimes decades.  Think of what 45 has the legitimate right to do to our judiciary (with an obeisant Congress's support, of course): it'll be decades before some of these 'justices' age out of our system, which will give them a long, long time to continue to stack the deck in favor of the powerful.

So, in addition to advocating - actually getting to know our elected representatives, but, more importantly, having them get to know us individually and collectively - and voting, we need to protest, to show up in the streets (nonviolently, of course) and in the media - including and especially now, social media - and let our legitimate demands be known.  And then go and back this up at the polls so that we create a positive virtuous cycle in our civic life.

The one thing that money can't buy in politics is the ability to overcome a fully engaged electorate.  Hillary Clinton didn't only lose because of the Electoral Collage, she also lost because too many ostensible supporters - or, at least, those whose interests were more aligned with her platform than her opponent's - stayed home.  As true as it is that 70,000 additional votes in three key states could have created a different (and, almost objectively now, better) outcome, the real travesty was that only 60% of our fellow citizens chose to vote in this clearly watershed election.  (I'm guessing that there are a lot of grumblers in that 40% who have absolutely no legitimate claim to do so.)  Yes, the Right's fraudulent advertising can influence some of the electorate, but it can't keep them all from showing up at the polls.  That's the unbeatable strategy: to show up and vote while we still can.

But I digress (again).

And if we are compelled to engage and advocate in a non-violent way, what should we seek?  In a phrase, a more equitable and inclusive society.  Achieving this would actually Make America Great for the First Time, as it would be the debut of our actually living up to our professed creeds - in which we espouse equality of humanity and of access to opportunity - for all of our fellow citizens.

We need a free, equitable and more inclusive society so that all of our interests and needs can be reflected in our public policy, both at the national and local levels.  And we need to be hyper-vigilant in our resisting until we achieve this - all of this - as tempting as it is to dial it back a notch or two after significant gains.

From this vantage point and at this time when the forces of evil seem ascendant, this looks like fantasy, but it's not.  Our history teaches us this: but for the NAACP, there would never have been a Brown v. Board decision in 1954, which led to Emmett Till's heinous murder, which, in turn, led forces to coalesce to protest this travesty that served as the core of the Civil Rights Movement.

So, today, Black Lives Matter has coalesced to protest the unconscionable and unpunished killing of unarmed African-Americans at the hands of the police across this country as the Women's March did to protest the candidacy and election of a sexual predator, which have helped to foment an even broader resistance.  Let these be the core of an ever-widening, more inclusive Resistance, focused on making real our country's claims to egalitarianism.

I think of it as the coalescence of a Radical Humanist Movement (or, in King-ian terms, the Beloved Community), one in which one's humanity is the only thing that matters - and thus must be respected - and the other circumstances of your life, while they should be appreciated and celebrated to a point, must never be allowed to reduce the acknowledgement of you cardinal worth.  It doesn't matter if you're Black, Brown, female, LBGTQ, atheist, Christian, Muslim, immigrant, poor, whatever: it matters that you're a fellow human being - in my eyes, a fellow Child of God, but, again, I realize that some may not choose this designation for themselves and also that it's their choice that matters - and therefore you are entitled to be treated as such and to have access to the opportunities that flow from (constructive) participation in our society, period.

And as we fight for the full rights of all, we must be as incisive as Baldwin in assessing our situation and as trenchant in advocating for ourselves and in contesting the defenders of the (inequitable) status quo.  In other words, like our beloved Jimmy, we must insist on the right to criticize our country perpetually when in fails to live up to its professed creeds because we love it and will endeavor to make it better.  But, like Baldwin, we'll call out evil clearly ... and then organize, protest and advocate to contest and overcome it.

To return to where this began, as much as I lament us having lost our way in so many facets of our collective life, I do believe that the American Experiment can be reformulated anew and continue in an ever more powerfully positively influential way in the future ... but it'll require a revolution of values (as MLK pointed out), where, to borrow the phrase from the passionate and piercingly insightful Rev. Dr. Obery Hendricks, we treat the people's needs as holy (which presumes that we focus on all of the people and endeavor in good faith to find a solution that works as well as possible for the greatest number of us [and then seek to ameliorate any unfortunately disabling side effects for any who are harmed]).  In other words, we must endeavor ever to be equitable and to ground our efforts in good faith as we do so, realizing that achieving a reasonable balance is itself a challenge in our wonderfully but fully diverse society and, indeed, world.

Along the way we can be both guided and chided by MLK and Baldwin, whose legacies of love, insight and advocacy are evergreen as well as ever more relevant to us today.  So I'll reclaim the radical King - the speaker of truth to power who was far less popular in his final years because he held a mirror to America that indicted us all - and the ever-radical Baldwin to inspire me and gird me for what will surely be a long fight, the fight, in fact, of our lives.  I will hold fast to that lodestar vision of the Beloved Community, a place and time in which all will be welcome and celebrated for who they are and what they can do not only for themselves but for the betterment of us all as well.

I accept that this vision is a long way off for now, but will you join me on the path?  As arduous as it will undoubtedly prove at times, can we invest ourselves more meaningfully than in this pursuit?

As Cornell West put it,

The response of the radical King to our catastrophic moment

can be put  in one word: revolution - a revolution in our

priorities, a reevaluation of our values, a reinvigoration of

our public life, and a fundamental transformation of our way

of thinking and living that promotes a transfer of power from

oligarchs and plutocrats to everyday people and ordinary citizens.

- Cornell West, ed., The Radical King (2015) 

And as Dr. King himself suggested, we should seek,

An overflowing love which seeks nothing in return, agape is

the love of God operating in the human heart.  At this level,

we love (all) men not because we like them, nor because their

ways appeal to us, nor even because they possess some type

of divine spark; we love every (hu)man because God loves him.

- The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,

Strength to Love (1963)