Upon Reading The Recently Released Writings of Dr. King

(from the archives)
19970627.1805 – OKC to ATL

“Upon Reading The Recently Released Writings of Dr. King”
postmoderen, post-soul reflections written at 32 thousand feet.

In 2014, it will have been 50 years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act and as I reflect on the release of Hong Kong and the fall of the Raj in 1997 I am curious about what will be asked. Today I am not certain I am asked to do anything more than vent – my feeling in the long understood of and devalued currency of Black Rage is what all expect to hear. I am tired of that dialog.

I am like many a gangsta rapper – my allegiances to the dollar and my own power echoes in the vacuum of slain forefathers. Nothing is above mockery, in silence stand sentinels of order. I find in their quiet dignity only the simplicity and humility of those overwhelmed. I keep trying to jump – like a prophetic frog sitting in slowly boiling water. I don’t want to want to suffocate blindly, yet I don’t know what really lies beyond. So we are jumping and shouting half-afraid and half longing to be slapped into a place we know we don’t belong. Is this self-destructive? I don’t know.

The problem with living for affluence in America is that you struggle for privilege and prominence amongst those who struggle for survival. Yet survival is so easy here – no one lives in fear of dysentery or starvation of malaria – that survivors are easily dismissed. Everyone’s suffering seems equally shallow – no one is oppressed, merely disadvantaged, disillusioned and socially dysfunctional. Yet if there are those who truly suffer, they are so out of reach – so far from our striving arena that their very existence is mythology. We conjure up the spirits of carjackers and rapists and embody them into the faces of those who are sufficiently distant. Our voodoo consciousness is so pervasive that none seem content to simply rob passersby for supper money. Crimes are outsized, spectacular and deranged. The disadvantaged watch television dramas written by paranoid millionaires, take lessons and plot.

So there often seems no morality clear enough to grasp and shepherd the suppressed and oppressed – its all varying degrees of the same ethics of white collar crime. Smart greed and danger and brutality are the signifiers of poverty.

In this uncivil society what are Civil Rights for? When all politics are bought and paid for, what is the purpose of free speech? I sometimes believe that our nation is too large for movements – the airwaves too full of mixed signals to maintain any significant message for any significant group. So when they ask me in 17 years, my story will sound nothing like anyone else’s I fear. I will have become a disembodied individual, subject to the same dissonance and greed as everyone else.

Many people predict that great crises await. Something might come that humbles us to our roots or the even our own love of ourselves will destroy the mesh between us. But I wonder what that great mesh is, what is citizenship today? What indeed is holding our country together? Mortgages? Families? Employment? Religion? I think it is familiarity. We are held together by McDonalds, Sears, good roads and television networks, by interstate commerce and the ubiquity of mid-western English. We just happened to be a Christian country but we are not called to be Christian in the next state – we are called to produce a major credit card – then we may pass. It is not the content of our character but the flashing blue LEDs which say ‘approved’. If a crisis is to be, a great number of computer networks and trucking routes must fail. I can’t recall a day in my life when the sun didn’t rise or some TV somewhere didn’t draw the waves. It would take sabotage, and who would dare? Who could?

In small cities across our nation, there are suburban conveniences and infrastructure which are all too often awe inspiring. How they are run is a secret – somehow we have the world’s best hospitals and cellular phone system. This is the land of the idiot proof, plus we get free coupons. A lifetime of transactions have already been specified. All we need do is prepare to make selections and it feels like freedom. Ask any American about their freedom and they will tell you 1000 things already dreamt 300 years ago. We have no idea how free we are not, and who is to show us any better? Dayton, Ohio is a town for Bosnian Summitry.

Civil Rights may well have been inevitable. Perhaps they were. Back in the old days before ATM networks and KISS FM, some people were isolated enough to conceive of a different type of freedom, and others were provincial enough to deny it. Maybe it was easier in those times to get enough of a good original idea together it would fall into minds with less crowded bandwidth, find root and bear fruit. And so barriers were broken because human spirits grasped something deeply needed and deeply personal. We have been sighing ever since.

I have imagined an historical imperative to move forward based on the wisdom of that age, and yesterday for the first time I saw a book filled with the writings of the man of two who has symbolized all that great turning point has meant. In those words perhaps I will grasp that original spirit and reconsider what freedoms are yet to be, what networks are yet to be built over which a more authentic traffic might be carried.

We have lived, year after year with rebroadcast visions and snippets of dreamy rhetoric. And we have lived in a cynical world of privilege, contempt, deceit and bombast. If I can discover what moved one million or a bus full in the direction of greater civility and freedom then perhaps when I answer that question I may answer with and unexpectedly inspiring voice. We all need inspiration, desperately. By rights we deserve that.