Now is the Time

Today is the day we celebrate the life and vision of Martin Luther King. When my youngest sons were growing up, we played his speeches on this day every year. Listening to them through a child’s ears, I literally shivered with pleasure and pride. Barack Obama was president. 

Dr. King urged us to march. “Now is not the time for the tranquilizing drug of gradualism,” he said.

I don’t think Dr. King would be as shocked as I am that a racist is president, and that racial hatred is openly abroad in the land. He grew up in the Jim Crow south. He faced down George Wallace. He watched Klansmen ride out of Stone Mountain in Atlanta in white robes and hoods on their way to light the burning crosses of racial terror. He was willing to sit in jail in Birmingham.

Most of us are not selfish. We are willing to share what we have with others in need. The greatest thing we Americans have to share is our freedom. Our instinct, or at least our moral aspiration, is to lift our lamp beside the golden door.

But Trump has made us afraid, or some of us anyway. He has appealed to the basest side of us, the side of which we should be ashamed, and of which, in private, we are ashamed. But in a mob…well, we all know what mobs are capable of, whether Southern lynch mobs or Nazi brownshirts.

Now is the time to stand up to the Trump mob.

If we do not, will we suffer? Will we, as they say, get what we deserve? 

No, most of us who read and write these kinds of thoughts won’t. But millions of our fellow citizens, our fellow residents, our fellow human beings from all over the world, will. And when they are brought low and we are walled off in our elite white utopia, what will we be?

What is any man or woman who hears the suffering of others and turns away?