What to Say on a Day Like Today?
I’ve struggled to write this post. What to say on a day like today? Of course there are so many things I might say about the day because of its significance – after all, Martin Luther King, Jr. lived a life worth celebrating. Moreover, we’re still in the official mourning period for President Jimmy Carter, whose life as a human being is an inspiration to all who care about other human beings. But there’s also that other agenda item – an agenda item that represents a series of events that has already caused harm to many and promises even more suffering for many more people. I hope against hope that the transition marked by this event will turn out to be a temporary detour, and that the long arc of the moral universe will bend once again towards justice, both in whatever remains of our country and also in the world more generally.
It’s appropriate to refer to that arc of the moral universe today, since Martin Luther King urged listeners to remember it when he offered the Baccalaureate sermon at Wesleyan University in 1964. But I think also of what seems likely to be the original expression of the sentiment, or at least its first prominent expression in the United States. It comes from a sermon that the Unitarian minister Theodore Parker delivered in the 19th century.
Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.
I differ from Parker in one crucial respect: I simply don’t see “a continual and progressive triumph of the right.” (In the current climate, perhaps it’s worth noting that Parker wasn’t referring to what we now refer to as the political right.) I think we have had some moves toward justice, but whatever triumph they express has hardly been continual.
Parker preached that sermon in 1852, when the United States was approaching another moral crisis; a crisis that, as Heather Cox Richardson reminds us, has some striking analogies to the crisis we face today. There were moments in the years leading up to and including the Civil War when many must have thought that the arc would surely break away from justice rather than bend toward it. Further, as Richardson says, there were many on the losing side of that war who immediately began to rewrite the history, seeking to claim their own position as the true expression of justice. The Union’s victory in that war didn’t bring anything approaching full justice, but it was at least a bending toward a more just world. Such bending toward justice continues to be challenged by those celebrating in today’s other agenda item as they seek to rewrite recent history in their own image.
I said above that I hope against hope that Parker and King were right. I hope that everything that is represented in the other agenda item of the day turns out to be a temporary detour. Part of what gives me that hope is the courage that people like Heidi Li Feldman bring to the struggle.
Back to where I started: I woke up this morning not at all sure of what I could say. I’m not satisfied with what I’ve said; I post this entry because I simply did not want to get to the end of the day having said nothing.