“We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”

 

Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man's sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.
Martin Luther King Jr.


Every year I try to write something about Martin Luther King Jr. in regards to education. In my career as a teacher, and in my life, events turned in such a way to open my eyes to many forms of suffering-unfair and unjust situations. I have recounted here being a student in Mrs. Gadys Peyton's room. I've told about my stint teaching in South Central LA during what was then termed "the crack years."
I've taught in areas of poverty in my 30 plus year career.
I came from Appalachia, certainly no stranger to poverty either, where I had good teacher training in a state university.

I remember Dr. King backwards, in that his death was the strongest first memory, and the aftermath for me was unwinding "knowing" him later- because he died when I was in 4th grade. I did know of his work by that age, his living work-speeches and marches, but I was developing social consciousness in the time after the age of nine when his life and death were important to me. I can thank my mother no doubt for that awareness. So when I read his book The Strength To Love, teaching in Watts at the age of 27, I became drawn into his discussion of exactly how poverty works. How the language of the one "with" in a rich/poor dichotomy frames the argument, the justifying that having wealth is at the expense of another, and it has deep need to be seen as fair and just and the resources to assure that happening as I think we now see in the corporatization of public school, like hate also works so too poverty.  This has characteristics which can be understood in a right and wrong way. King's religion informed him of that. It was a relationship of two forces. He spoke of how the oppressor/oppressed relationship is symbiotic- as the oppressed take on the narrative of being failure and believes. In his writing Dr. King, if you will read him,  looks deeply :

• History unfortunately leaves some people oppressed and some people oppressors. And there are three ways that individuals who are oppressed can deal with their oppression. One of them is to rise up against their oppressors with physical violence and corroding hatred. But oh this isn’t the way. For the danger and the weakness of this method is its futility. Violence creates many more social problems than it solves. And I’ve said, in so many instances, that as the Negro, in particular, and colored peoples all over the world struggle for freedom, if they succumb to the temptation of using violence in their struggle, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and our chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos. Violence isn’t the way.

• Another way is to acquiesce and to give in, to resign yourself to the oppression. Some people do that. They discover the difficulties of the wilderness moving into the promised land, and they would rather go back to the despots of Egypt because it’s difficult to get in the promised land. And so they resign themselves to the fate of oppression; they somehow acquiesce to this thing. But that too isn’t the way because non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.

• But there is another way. And that is to organize mass non-violent resistance based on the principle of love. It seems to me that this is the only way as our eyes look to the future. As we look out across the years and across the generations, let us develop and move right here. We must discover the power of love, the power, the redemptive power of love. And when we discover that we will be able to make of this old world a new world. We will be able to make men better. Love is the only way.

I've written to this here.

So this year, on MLk Day along with a cat with an injured eye, I had a surprise. In a way.
I did not watch football on the weekend. But I sat in the room next to one where two men I love did watch in a nation watching. I just looked up at the sound of a football player yelling beside a reporter, then watched it replayed over and over into something called "a story."
I didn't have ANY context-not watching this particular game- because I was grading and doing lesson planning for the coming week, around really interesting units on multiplication for my third graders. But I did listen carefully to what Richard Sherman said after four replays-I didn't make out ANY profanity, not much of anything but a guy really excited,  but I did see in my Facebook a few folks posting things like "real classy" and then their posts containing enormous examples of people responding really, really badly (far worse than anything on that brief spot being replayed I assure you)  that actually on this holiday weekend shocked me.
So I dug a little deeper on hearing my husband say, "Stanford boy," "worked up," and "kid came outta Watts and that ain't easy to do." So I thought about what was on my Facebook, which I feel I cannot post here, but I will say it did include a plea he "not breed."

Well.

 "Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think."  Martin Luther King Jr.

Coinciding with our celebration of the birth of Dr. King in coming to Earth to help us evolve, I do now think I'll talk about this a bit after reading today and listening to Mr. Sherman talk on TV tonight, in another setting. So what I saw was a lot of calling him a "thug," and I'm surprised really because I have seen a lot worse on TV sports, in the past. I listened to the press, watched commentators, read a very interesting blog piece. ( God I thought of Mohammad Ali actually blustering before fight and really, this was that big a deal?)

My son says (at the time), "He's just calling out a dude, maybe bein a sore winner, but they pay the dude to do a hard job and some guy Mom just got on him." Talking my son, to gain perspective on this, I thought, hum. He went on to tell me a lot about Sherman. Including he had no idea "why people were caring on this." Luca speak is wonderful actually.

The great problem facing modern man is that, that the means by which we live have outdistanced the spiritual ends for which we live. So we find ourselves caught in a messed-up world. The problem is with man himself and man's soul. We haven't learned how to be just and honest and kind and true and loving. And that is the basis of our problem. The real problem is that through our scientific genius we've made of the world a neighborhood, but through our moral and spiritual genius we've failed to make of it a brotherhood.

• Rediscovering Lost Values, Sermon delivered at Detroit's Second Baptist Church (28 February 1954).

I stopped in on one Facebook comment thing-thread- to mention that a kid out of Watts going to Stanford-one with a good academic record, is amazing. It actually is a choice. And I steered clear of giving my opinion on who ought to "breed", "what's classy" or how I feel about the violence in football, and how the world of professional sports has worked for those that are involved in the harsh realities of it. I do have insight into this, but I did say I'd taught in Watts and those are real accomplishments he has.

He is a role model. There is no doubt in my mind he is.

(I taught in Watts, he's remarkable truly. As I see any student attaining entrance to such an institution as Stanford I salute that.)

Dr. King pointed this out somehow first for me-the need to recognize choices, effort, education. I reflected on this as I heard so many references to a "thug."

• We have adopted in the modern world a sort of a relativistic ethic... Most people can't stand up for their convictions, because the majority of people might not be doing it. See, everybody's not doing it, so it must be wrong. And since everybody is doing it, it must be right. So a sort of numerical interpretation of what's right. But I'm here to say to you this morning that some things are right and some things are wrong. Eternally so, absolutely so. It's wrong to hate. It always has been wrong and it always will be wrong. It's wrong in America, it's wrong in Germany, it's wrong in Russia, it's wrong in China. It was wrong in 2000 B.C., and it's wrong in 1954 A.D. It always has been wrong, and it always will be wrong. It's wrong to throw our lives away in riotous living. No matter if everybody in Detroit is doing it, it's wrong. It always will be wrong, and it always has been wrong. It's wrong in every age and it's wrong in every nation. Some things are right and some things are wrong, no matter if everybody is doing the contrary. Some things in this universe are absolute. The God of the universe has made it so. And so long as we adopt this relative attitude toward right and wrong, we're revolting against the very laws of God himself.
  • Rediscovering Lost Values, Sermon delivered at Detroit's Second Baptist Church (28 February 1954).

Richard Sherman pointed out he was not criminal, hadn't met the definition of a thug. He had strived otherwise.

I thought of this for me to reflect upon as I once long ago in church sat with passages to reflect upon:

How do you go about loving your enemies? I think the first thing is this: In order to love your enemies, you must begin by analyzing self. And I’m sure that seems strange to you, that I start out telling you this morning that you love your enemies by beginning with a look at self. It seems to me that that is the first and foremost way to come to an adequate discovery to the how of this situation. … some people aren’t going to like you. They’re going to dislike you, not because of something that you’ve done to them, but because of various jealous reactions and other reactions that are so prevalent in human nature. But after looking at these things and admitting these things, we must face the fact that an individual might dislike us because of something that we’ve done deep down in the past, some personality attribute that we possess, something that we’ve done deep down in the past and we’ve forgotten about it; but it was that something that aroused the hate response within the individual. That is why I say, begin with yourself. There might be something within you that arouses the tragic hate response in the other individual.

Perhaps the only suggestion I might make to Richard Sherman, if any,  is to look at how his reaction to another's taunting came to affect a nation more widely. And to keep talking to us. But I would never suggest he has to answer for the sheer volume of racially based slop that drew forth about this onto instant technological paths that allow us to see ourselves, if we look.

In my son, seeing this burst on air, he saw it as so small a thing, proportionally small, an excited man reacting. In Luca I first saw the most sensible response to Richard Sherman. But as I was reading Dr. King this found me:

• Forgiveness does not mean ignoring what has been done or putting a false label on an evil act. It means, rather, that the evil act no longer remains as a barrier to the relationship. Forgiveness is a catalyst creating the atmosphere necessary for a fresh start and a new beginning. It is the lifting of a burden or the canceling of a debt. The words "I will forgive you, but never forget what you have done" never explain the real nature of forgiveness. Certainly one can never forget, if that means erasing totally for his mind. But when we forgive, we forget in the sense that the evil deed is no longer a mental block impeding a new relationship. Likewise, we can never say, "I will forgive you, but I won't have anything further to do with you." Forgiveness means reconciliation, a coming together again. Without this, no man can ever love his enemies. The degree to which we are able to forgive determines the degree to which we are able to love our enemies.

Would it not be better for all of us to forgive the outburst if it felt a problem for you, put it in a context, and allow our care for one another to hope we can see our responding to it with vitriol and fury end, maybe, might, could we indicate, as a nation have much more work to do?

There is a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually. We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers.

But we can work on it.


Oh and my son brought me this to return a smile and humor to my face: