What an amazing confluence of events. We celebrate the life of Dr. Martin Luther King just as we take a great step towards realizing his dream. His dream is not yet a reality. There is still racism, sexism, classism and homophobia. We have not arrived at the day when all will be judged by the content of our character. We have not arrived at the Promised Land, but we are arriving. We have not overcome, but we are overcoming. His dream has become finally our dream.
Winston Churchill said in WWII after a victory in the battle of El Alamein, “Now is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
Well, we are in better shape than Great Britain was. While this is not the end of racism, it is the beginning of the end. We are on a mountaintop and can see the Promised Land. Today we are all higher on the mountain than we were 40 years ago, and the Promised Land is nearer. Unlike so many dreams, it has not receded as we have approached.
One of the great lessons of today is that we mustn’t be afraid of dreaming, nor may we let the naysayers kill our hopes. During the civil rights era, there were many naysayers and they were not just the people who knowingly wanted to stop civil rights. The vast majority of the naysayers were not bigots or haters. They were, instead, practical people, people who could read the room and who knew the politics. They were people who didn’t say, “No never.” They said, “Not now. The time is not right. You’re asking for too much too soon. Wait. Use caution.”
If the perfect is the enemy of the good and the possible, the “right time” thinking that looks for the perfect window of opportunity is often the enemy of the right thing. As the sage Hillel asked rhetorically, “If not now, when?”
Martin Luther King was told that the people weren’t ready for full equality. He was told that demonstrations would only slow down civil rights and that the backlash would hurt his cause. These often well-meaning people did not understand that it wasn’t his cause; it was their cause too. As Americans, it was our cause.
I believe it is always the right time to do the right thing. I understand that we may not always do the right thing–that caution and fear, that common wisdom and inertia can stop us.
If you look at the odds and carefully reason your chances of succeeding, I can promise you, you will accomplish nothing. Our history, religious and secular, is filled with improbability–from anyone even remembering an obscure carpenter from the fringes of the mighty Roman Empire, to the unlikely survival of the tribe from which he came. No one would have given Luther much of a chance of surviving his “Here I stand; I can do no other” and nailing his thesis on the gates of the cathedral. No one seems to have thought much about the chances of the great, if imperfect, experiment in democracy that is America.
I’m not at all sure I would have liked the odds on Abraham Lincoln being either elected or being remembered as great. He was an unlikely candidate with an unlovely appearance, a stranger voice and wholly without the conventional theology of this nation. Rosa Parks sitting down and not moving to the back of the bus by tradition, law or angry threats, was not the odds-on favorite for bringing down segregation by simply doing the right thing. The smart money was on Lester Maddox, George Wallace and Bull Connor.
Nor was the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King the natural choice to stand up against first segregation, then classism and finally the war in Vietnam. A friend of mine who went to school with him admits ruefully that he did not see King’s greatness of either talent or spirit in their post-graduate studies together. Dr. King was not born great; he became great by doing with passion what he believed, deep in his heart, was the right thing. Yes, he had the ability, but neither brains nor talent would have availed him or our nation, had he lacked the courage and integrity to step forward and put his life on the line.
As I have written and spoken about this past election in so many venues–and so many times, I have had a lot of positive responses and kudos. Most of the feedback has been kind, even from people who made different judgments from mine. However, I have also received hate mail that has been racist, personal, anti-Semitic and bordering on threatening. I have been told to leave the country and go back to where I belong. I have been told that I hate America and that real America hates me. I have been called a fool and a dupe. People have promised me that Obama is a Muslim, an Arab, an Al Qaeda agent and, of course, not a real American. They have offered proof that he was born in Kenya and that his Hawaiian birth certificate is a forgery. They tend not to respond when I point out the thus amazing prescience of this grand conspiracy to announce the birth of Barack Hussein Obama II on August 4, 1961 and print it in The Honolulu Advertiser on August 13, 1961. Were they thinking that clearly in planting this sleeper cell way back then, they would surely have excised his middle name, Hussein.
Talk about an unlikely candidate. The odds against Barack Hussein Obama were incalculable. Effectively, he is the child of a single white mother and absent African father, raised in lower middle class surroundings, getting to Columbia, Harvard, the Senate and the presidency. Well, there was no smart money on him.
Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech was two Augusts in the future at the time of Obama’s birth. I’m not sure that even Dr. King could have foreseen this day, this mountaintop and the new hopes and dreams we share for our nation and the world.
It is, judging by my mail, a long way still to the Promised Land but I swear to you I can see it and smell its sweet fragrance. Trials and tears, thorns and obstacles still block the way, but I know it is not illusion or delusion. That land is there within the wide horizon of our finest hopes.
2009 Jonathan Dobrer