MLK and the winter of discontent

Martin Luther King Jr (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

I'm feeling quite out of sorts these days. It's an unpleasant mix of anxiety, discouragement, restlessness and rage, individually unremarkable (for me, anyway) but collectively rather potent and hard to get out from under.

Part of it's the weather. The long dark days of mid-January have this week featured two major snowfalls, followed by deeply subzero temperatures. I have been moving snow and moving snow, and then when it stopped falling, I've continued to move snow because of massive drifting. (This is not really a very good excuse, I realize, since everyone else in town has been dealing with the same weather.) Our driveway is off an alley, which the city does not regularly maintain, so for three days after the last flake fell it was still full of snow. We successfully took a car out Sunday, but got it stuck trying to get it back up the alley, which required moving a lot more snow as well as the assistance of our across-the-street neighbor Bob. There are more details in this story of woe, which I will spare you, because this blog is about place-making and community-building, which I will eventually get to.

Snow is everywhere (Photo by Jane Claspy Nesmith)

Another part of it is politics. Amid the horrors of wars in Ukraine and Gaza, we have been dealing here with the verbal frenzy that is the Iowa caucus, as Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, and Donald Trump tried to jones their final numbers. (For a particularly good takedown of caucus madness, see Lenz 2024.) Trump, the often-indicted, insult spewing, anti-community manchild who has become a conservative folk hero, was sure to be the winner at the caucuses, and is the probable Republican presidential nominee. He refers to his opponents as "vermin" and "enemies," and accuses immigrants of "poisoning the blood" of the country, to raucously cheering crowds. He got 53.1 percent of the general election vote in Iowa in 2020, and will probably beat that this year. Meanwhile, our Governor, Kim Reynolds, who won her last election with 59.5 percent of the vote, has been announcing initiatives like upending regional education agencies and refusing federal food aid for poor children because "childhood obesity has become an epidemic" (see Rampell 2024). She is endorsing DeSantis, the Florida governor known mainly for scapegoating refugees and using them as political props. Why do I live here again?

The caucuses themselves were scheduled, for some reason, on Martin Luther King Day itself. As a result, the usual Monday night service at St. Paul's United Methodist Church--I wrote about last year's observance here--was cancelled. I would have gone.

Grace Episcopal Church (Source: church website)

King celebrants did not disappear, though. A day of service was held Saturday, kicking off a spring-long series of events to be announced. Eventually a service was added to the schedule, Sunday afternoon at historic Grace Episcopal Church. At that observance, Sarah Swayze was honored with the Dr. Percy and Lileah Harris 'Who is My Neighbor?' Award.

Sarah Swayze (Source: Empowering Youths of Iowa)

Ms. Swayze, who lives in the Wellington Heights neighborhood mere blocks from my house, founded Empowering Youths of Iowa, a nonprofit that provides mentors for high school students (King 2024).

I missed the service as I struggled with the snow. I did participate Monday in Coe's annual transcribathon for the Library of Congress, endeavoring to decipher two letters written in the 1870s by future president James Garfield.

James Garfield wrote this. Who could read it?

The annual King holiday is an opportunity to rededicate ourselves to building the "beloved community" of which he often spoke and wrote. We meet together, in the middle of winter and in the middle of the increasing madness of our body politic, and remember his vision, and why we do what we do. While Trump sweeps all before him at the precinct caucuses, we remember the anti-Trump; instead of spewing insults and spreading hate, King promoted a vision of a beloved community where people of all sorts worked across their differences because they recognized a common human destiny. When we see others speaking our language, King's language, working for the same goals, often way harder than your humble blogger does, our conviction is renewed. For the moment, we know we're not crazy, no matter how marginal we seem to the daily hurly-burly.

We sing this song every Martin Luther King Day, which might be my favorite hymn of all time (6:06):

At least it's better than "Try It in a Small Town."

We need to remember, too, that King also faced discouragement, and the same existential woe that I and possibly you are experiencing. At Christmas 1967, years after the hope of the Montgomery bus boycott and the triumphant "I Have a Dream" speech, King faced impatience and discontent within the civil rights movement, as well as great personal danger as events were soon to prove. "Peace on Earth," he began, quoting the angels' song in Luke 2:

This Christmas season finds us a rather bewildered human race. We have neither peace within nor peace without.... Our world is sick with war; everywhere we turn we see its ominous possibilities. And yet, my friends, the Christmas hope for peace and good will toward all men can no longer be dismissed as a kind of pious dream of some utopian. If we don't have good will toward men in this world, we will destroy ourselves by the misuse of our own instruments and our own power. (M.L. King [1967] 1991: 253)

The dream of 1963 was far from reality.

In 1963, on a sweltering August afternoon, we stood in Washington, D.C., and talked to the nation about many things. Toward the end of that afternoon, I tried to talk to the nation about a dream that I had had, and I must confess to you today that not long after talking about that dream I started seeing it turn into a nightmare. I remember the first time I saw that dream turn into a nightmare, just a few weeks after I had talked about it. It was when four beautiful, unoffending, innocent Negro girls were murdered in a church in Birmingham, Alabama. I watched that dream turn into a nightmare as I moved through the ghettos of the nation.... (257)

And yet, hope is our only choice.

Yes, I am personally the victim of deferred dreams, of blasted hopes, but in spite of that I close today by saying I still have a dream, because, you know, you can't give up in life. If you lose hope, somehow you lose that vitality that keeps life moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you go on in spite of all. And so today I still have a dream.

I have a dream that one day men will rise up and come to see that they are made to live together as brothers... I still have a dream today that in all of our state houses and city halls men will be elected to go there who will do justly and love mercy and walk humbly with their God.... I still have a dream that with this faith we will be able to adjourn the councils of despair and bring new light into the dark chambers of pessimism. With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when there will be peace on earth and good will toward men. It will be a glorious day, the morning stars will sing together, and the sons of God will shout for joy. (257-258)

The whole sermon (29:30):

 

Today, 16 January 2024, is not that glorious day, and the shouts of joy I hear are those of the caucus victors, full of vengeance and grievance and misplaced anger. And yet, Dr. King reminds us to keep working for justice and real community, because, really, what choice do we have?

 

Even though I drove out of my garage this morning, across the newly-plowed alley, directly into a snowbank.

SOURCES: 

Grace King, "Nonprofit Founder to Get 'Neighbor' Award," Cedar Rapids Gazette, 14 January 2014, 2A

Martin Luther King Jr., "A Christmas Sermon on Peace," in James M. Washington (ed), A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. (HarperCollins, 1991), 253-258.

SOME GOOD NEWS: 

Nicholas Kristof, "This Was a Terrible Year, and Maybe Also the Best One for Humanity," New York Times, 30 December 2023

Catherine Rampell, "Congress is About to Do Something Amazing: Agree to Invest in Kids," Washington Post, 15 January 2024

"A Transformed Memphis: Inspiration from the Civic Commons in 2023," Reimagining the Civic Commons, 16 January 2024