Progressive activists in America are exhausted. We’ve been faced with so many defeats, for so many years, on so many fronts, that there seems to be no reason to believe that we can resist the right wing agenda. We’ve been faced with devastating betrayals too, as Democratic politicians we had hoped would be our allies in the struggle turned their backs on us instead and helped George W. Bush put his militaristic, nationalistic, totalitarian agenda into place.
Things are very dark right now. Our Constitution hangs connected to our nation by just a few remaining shreds. The effort to end an unjust war has been beaten, not by a rational argument for that war, but by the shortness of America’s collective attention span. Our communities, our economy, and our culture seems to have been taken over by immense corporations that care little for the humans they use as resoures. The nations of the world are waist deep in a rising environmental crisis, and our government dithers.
What could be regarded as a path out of the darkness, this year’s presidential and congressional elections, have instead become regarded by many Americans, including many progressive activists, as uninspiring. We’ve been told that our choices in these elections have dwindled even before we’ve had the chance to have our say, and many of us, so used to being defeated, have chosen to believe this message of resignation, no matter how plainly it is contradicted by reality.
On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, it is worth remembering the advice Dr. King had to give to people facing oppression so strong it seemed pointless to resist:
“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.”
- Loving Your Enemies, November 17, 1957
Let’s be honest about this: The challenges of our day are not as difficult to overcome as the challenges Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. faced in his day. We have the power, thanks to the work of the activists of previous generations, to make things better. All we have to do is get out of our seats, and act.
Yet, for the most part, Americans are not getting out of their seats, not even enough to educate themselves about what’s going on outside of the small view they can have from where they sit.
There’s a sad reason America has remained sitting: Their seats are too comfortable, and they’re too afraid of what will happen if they stand up. They’ve decided that the second path described by Dr. King is the easiest one to take. It’s the wicked genius of the right wing government in power to have crafted a regime of oppression that feels soft and cushy to most people, just so long as we go along with it. Don’t worry about your freedom, your independence, your privacy, or the peace and stability of the world outside of your home, and there doesn’t seem to be a problem. Also looming is the threat that, if we don’t go along with the oppression, we will be attacked by vicious evildoers just waiting for a sign of collective doubt.
Maybe that’s the way that most Americans prefer to live now, choosing a comfortable servitude over the emancipating, yet often uncomfortable, American tradition of liberty through responsible citizenry. The fact that so many make that choice does not, however, require that you acquiesce along with them.
Today can be a day of rest for you, but it can also be a day of re-creation, a day upon which you commit yourself to standing up and walking the uphill path again, toward the America that ought to be.
