During our last online check-in, I was deeply moved by the empathy expressed regarding the state of our nation. So many lamented the seemingly unrelenting march to greater repression, especially if Project 2025 is implemented. Not wanting our legitimate fears to sink into depression, I stated that regardless of how dreadful things were in the past we’ve come through. And we would make it through what currently faces us and what may come. This is not an easy conclusion nor superficial one. It’s not merely that positive thinking will lead to positive results. One must work at this to make it true. That means engaging in the world with the wisdom to know and access our cosmic power that is available but often not utilized.
The human journey bears witness to the idea that truth crushed to the earth will rise again. (James Russell Lowell). It also bears witness that too often because of human frailties it did not rise soon enough. So slow to rise during the Holocaust that genocide claimed the lives of six million Jews and five million others including LGBTQI+ folk, Romani peoples, people with disabilities, and others. It never rose to prevent the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki although it did usher in the need for what is now the United Nations. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. reminded us:
We are faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late…. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: “Too late.”
King was not a pessimist. His words were meant to inspire those who heard them to understand “the fierce urgency of now. Now is the time.” The work must be done today. Our conversion, our turning around, our metamorphosis must be today.
The record is grim when we think about all the wars that have killed millions. Colonialism still has devastating effects on world politics and famine. When Dr. Howard Thurman states that “the contradictions of life are neither final nor ultimacy” he is pointing us to human and divine agency in the past available for us today. They are not final nor ultimate if we do not allow them to be final or ultimate, if we do not abandon our agency, our capacity, and creativity to transform the contradictions, the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood [community]. “With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.”
When I visited the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in Washington, the first thing I thought was the mountain of hope was too large, way out of proportion to the other parts. Then it hit me. “That’s the point!” Hope must be larger, more encompassing than despair.
Vahid Razavi’s forum Humanity's Last Hurrah or the Start of Love on August 1, 2024, will be a good place for conversation regarding this notion.
Michelle Alexander has authored a profound essay in the Nation journal, “Only Revolutionary Love Can Save Us Now. She engages Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, great speech Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence to explore its relevance today. She feels that something is different in the air. Appalled by the stench of death in so many places, she finds in the speech a message for today and tomorrow. She speaks of so many of the atrocities that seemingly overwhelm the public including the genocide in Gaza, the frightening possible end of our nation’s attempt at democracy, mass incarceration, the climate crisis that has young people especially anxious about their future and the future of the planet, AI and its role in mapping our ways of life, and the general malaise that seems to envelop our thoughts and actions.
When Alexander speaks of love, she is not talking about sentimental love. She speaks of love as King did: “I am speaking of that force which all the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life.” He continued by saying this force has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of humankind.
The brilliant feminist author bell hooks is aligned with him. In her powerful essay Love as the Practice of Freedom, hooks states “Without love, our efforts to liberate ourselves and our world community from oppression and exploitation are doomed. As long as we refuse to address fully the place of love in struggles for liberation, we will not be able to create a culture of conversion where there is a mass turning away from an ethic of domination.”
We are capable of this love.
King says, “We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls 'enemy,' for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.”
Alexander writes:
We can never know if our small acts of love or courage might make a bigger difference than we imagine. The fact that Black activists today are showing up at marches organized by Jewish students, who are raising their voices in solidarity with Palestinians who are suffering occupation and annihilation in Gaza, is due in no small part to thousands of small acts of revolutionary love that have occurred over the course of years, acts that I hope and pray are planting seeds that will eventually bloom into global movements for peace, justice, and liberation for all.
Twenty twenty-four just might be the year that changes everything. But the way that things change is ultimately up to us. It can be a time of world war, genocide, the collapse of democracy, and the loss of hope. Or it can be a time of great awakening—when we break our silences and act with greater courage and greater solidarity, a time when the existential threats that we are facing finally lead us to embrace humanity and perhaps even glimpse the spark of divinity that exists within each one of us, and all creation.
Something new is in the air. And it’s not just dread. In virtually every community, people are coming together in remarkable ways—learning about each other’s histories of struggle, marching together, cocreating with each other, planting seeds of something new together, making another way possible: a way out of no way. People are casting off old ways of seeing the world and being in the world and recognizing that everything depends on us rising to the challenges of our times, speaking unpopular truths, and acting with courage and love and the fierce urgency of now.
In the words of Grace Lee Boggs: “These are the times to grow our souls.” Let this be the moment that we commit ourselves to doing precisely that.
The late Congressman John Lewis drafted an essay for the New York Times shortly before his death to be published on the day of his funeral. It reminds me of Dr. King’s "I’ve Been to the Mountaintop" speech the day before his assassination. It is titled “Together, You Can Redeem the Soul of the Nation.”
While my time here has now come to an end, I want you to know that in the last days and hours of my life you inspired me. You filled me with hope about the next chapter of the great American story when you used your power to make a difference in our society. Millions of people motivated simply by human compassion laid down the burdens of division. Around the country and the world you set aside race, class, age, language and nationality to demand respect for human dignity.
Like so many young people today, I was searching for a way out, or some might say a way in, and then I heard the voice of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on an old radio. He said we are all complicit when we tolerate injustice. He said each of us has a moral obligation to stand up, speak up and speak out. When you see something that is not right, you must say something. You must do something... Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself.
Ordinary people with extraordinary vision can redeem the soul of America by getting in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble. Voting and participating in the democratic process are key. The vote is the most powerful nonviolent change agent you have in a democratic society. You must use it because it is not guaranteed. You can lose it.
Though I may not be here with you, I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe. In my life I have done all I can to demonstrate that the way of peace, the way of love and nonviolence is the more excellent way. Now it is your turn to let freedom ring. When historians pick up their pens to write the story of the 21st century, let them say that it was your generation who laid down the heavy burdens of hate at last and that peace finally triumphed over violence, aggression and war. So I say to you, walk with the wind, brothers and sisters, and let the spirit of peace and the power of everlasting love be your guide.
Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow,
Not some more convenient season.
It is today that our best work can be
done and not some future day or future
year.
It is today that we fit ourselves for
the greater usefulness of tomorrow.
Today is the seed time, now are the
hours of work, and tomorrow
comes the harvest and the playtime.
– W.E.B. DuBois
Please join the National Council of Elders for its extraordinary King Breaking Silence expanding on Michelle Alexander’s concept of Revolutionary Love. https://kingandbreakingsilence.org/media/
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