Ideas | Martin Luther King is a model of hope when we need it

Monday is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. and the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 47th President of the United States. It may seem like an odd pairing, especially for those of us who believe that Mr. Trump has created a culture of doubt, denial, and indifference when it comes to injustice.

But if Dr.’s life has taught us anything. King, it is this hope that is most needed when the evidence turns to despair. Based on dark times, hope leads us to something better.

The ministry of Dr. King was set in a country marked by segregation, unpopular foreign wars and the widespread social and economic exclusion of African Americans.

This is not 1963. But the difficult time that many of us think that the message of Dr. King.

The timing of his “I Have a Dream” speech, the 1963 March on Washington, came after a long period of anti-black violence. In May of that year, a demonstration against racial discrimination in Birmingham, Ala., which became known as the Children’s Crusade, was met with fire hoses, police dogs and batons. . That same month, an angry mob attacked a sit-in that took place at a Woolworth’s in Jackson, Miss. In June, civil rights activist Medgar Evers was murdered outside his home, also in Jackson.

When Dr. King in his speech that one day “the son of the former slave and the son of the former slave owner will sit at the table of brotherhood”, this dream is meant to represent reality. bloody and depressing now.

Dr. did not run away or deny the reality. King, but he didn’t let depression have the last word either. “I do not accept despair as the final answer to the bleakness of history,” he said during his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1964. “I refuse to accept the idea that human beings are jetsam and jetsam just in the river of life, unable to influence the events around him. I refuse to accept the notion that humanity is so tragically bound up in the starless midnight of racism and war that a bright sunrise and brotherhood will never be possible. “

He looked at the reality of the present and dared to challenge it.

Encouraged by Dr. King is the vision of peace between God and man, which was described by the Hebrew prophets in the Bible. The hope he turned to was first formed in the black church tradition of his youth. This tradition often had to rely on God’s help because it had no political or economic power.

He said in his Nobel Prize speech: “I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altar of God and be crowned with the crown of war and bloodshed, and declare the rule of the earth the good of salvation without violence.”

The troubles we have in the United States today are not the result of one election. The last decade or so of American life has seen an endless parade of mass shootings, racist violence, economic instability and wars in Israel, Gaza and Ukraine where innocent civilians suffered.

It is not difficult to talk about the problem. It is more difficult to find the strength to believe that there is hope beyond the jeremiad. Desperation never set anyone free.

Still inspired by the testimony of Dr. I’m King, but I don’t believe we can be content with borrowing his dreams. It is not enough for someone living in the rubble of 1963 to outline a vision that helped create a more just world in which we live. We need someone who has picked his way through the partial breakdown of recent years to bring in new words.

We need people with more courage to say that we don’t have to think of foreigners as threats but as co-bearers of God’s image. To see the struggle in our city for what it is, not as a way to change the subject. And the recognition that rural America is more than just a place to hold grudges and vote – it needs revitalization.

We cannot push suffering onto others without it coming back to us. Our world is connected whether we like to admit it or not. We can’t build walls high enough to eradicate the world’s problems, but we can reach far enough to make a difference in the lives of those who are suffering.

Dr. King is a role model through his expectations. This is his great gift to us. We honor him well if we remember that the third Monday of January is still for dreamers.