Martin Luther King Jr. and Barack Obama

January 15, 2009

Monday we celebrate the birthday of a man of peace, a man who did much more than dream and voice platitudes even when other ministers, both black and white, first quavered, and a large segment of our population branded Martin Luther King Jr. a “communist,” that once most damnable of appellations, for speaking out against injustice and violence against the oppressed both here and abroad.

With a biracial man and his wife now moving into a white house built by black slaves, and their young daughters enrolled with other children of privilege in a Quaker sanctuary, part of Dr. King’s dream is being realized.

Yes, the great civil rights leader went to the mountain top and saw the promised land, a land in which little black boys and black girls join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. But today’s little children still must surmount even greater peaks in the mountain ranges beyond integration – the peaks representing war, pestilence, famine and death , the peaks even now patrolled by the four horsemen of the Apocalypse who ride among us as munitions manufacturers, diseases decimating millions each year which could be controlled for pennies per capita, exploding poverty as the seeds of the earth are deliberately sterilized for profit, and lastly, the primordial lust for power in the DNA of many of our “leaders” which renders our fragile planet subject to war without end..

Dr. King was a man of peace but he was not a man of fear. He was jailed 30 times for leading nonviolent efforts against injustice He spoke out against the pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities that mark so many of our public discourse. True, you and I are far more frail vessels, but working together we helped elect Barack Obama, another transformational figure in our nation’s history.

Now Barack, like Dr. King, is asking us to develop a kind of “dangerous unselfishness” by working in community for the common good. As the world collapses around us, how can we recapture the ability to “work unceasingly to uplift this nation that we love to a higher plateau of compassion, to a more noble expression of humanness?” Through service to others, through the “audacity to hope” that one’s seemingly meager efforts may make a difference.

Wendell Berry wrote in The Hidden Wound that the urbanization of our population has deprived us of the competence of knowing how to take care of ourselves. People used to be skilled in the art of making do and subsistence living off the land. . But with the relocation of most of our population to the cities, Berry writes that our ability to do things was replaced by the ability to buy things based largely on our subservience to modern incarnations of the company store. This dependency, along with our self-centered gluttony and greed, has led to the collapse of the worldwide economic system, impoverishing not only our bodies but our souls as well.

But today there is a great awakening to the fact that our world is not working. Not only are there wars on four continents but the very earth itself is rebelling against our short sighted rape of its riches as the seas rise and the oxygen producing forests disappear.

Many people now see that they must adapt. They must become the change that Obama calls for. Service to others, not lives of tepid comfort in our little boxes of urban isolation with an occasional bone thrown to the needy, must become our greater aspiration.

Martin Luther King Jr. was cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. He wrote in his Letter from the Birmingham Jail that “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. . . Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.”

Barack Obama extended Dr. King’s words when in Berlin he said he was a proud citizen of the United States and a fellow citizen of the world. Let’s help him and ourselves by making sure that the world we leave our children is better than the world we inhabit today. In other words, think globally but act locally with vigor and courage. The light and love you radiate toward others will become the light which drives out darkness, hate and fear as together we climb the mountains encircling a promise of peace and justice for all..