On The Current Events

June 1, 2020

I’ve found that I’ve had trouble putting my thoughts into words in a way that I can feel comfortable with. A part of it, to be sure, is the feeling that I know that mine is not really the voice that we need at the moment. Another part is that my natural tendency is to stay quiet on the subjects on which I am less informed to avoid being incorrect. Ultimately, however, I figured that silence would be worse than saying things that weren’t quite right, and that while some blog post would not tip any scales, I could at least be a part of the conversation. While my opinions here can only be my own, I’m meanwhile trying to listen what those who are more knowledgeable than I and to evolve my own understanding as I hear what they have to say.

Somehow, it has only been in these past few days that I’ve come across the full text of Martin Luther King’s “The Other America” speech. The startling thing to me–reading this speech that is over 50 years old at this point–is how current it feels. Dr. King describes a society wracked by social and economic inequalities, and the ills he describes could just as easily find their home on the literature of the protestor today.

And there’s a part of me that can’t help but look at this text and lament the tragedy we’re all in. That we’ve been stuck in this same cycle for decades now. That the long list of unarmed Black men whose lives have been cut short prematurely continues to grow. That the images of protestors facing violence at the hands of the authorities are as common today as they were during the 1960s. And it’s easy to feel, when one looks at how this tragedy has endured for so long, that we may be stuck forever.

But I also can’t accept that. Giving up cannot be the right answer.

I don’t really know what the solutions are, but I do know that it won’t be easy. As Dr. King stated in that same speech, “Somewhere we must come to see that social progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated Individuals.” There will be causes that need funding, legislation needing advocating, campaigns needing organizing, systems needing reforming, and so on and so on and so on. This will all be work, and it will not be easy, and it will not be obvious or unanimous at all times what the right thing to do will be.

It seems like it should be easier, to get the country to acknowledge that, yes, Black Lives Matter, and that each individual death is not an isolated incident that can be explained away as a fluke, but that each is part of a larger pattern, a pattern rooted in hundreds of years of injustice, the legacy of which we are all the inheritors. But the future is not yet written, and together, we can make it the place where we all can live.