Civil War

“ …in every one of us..there’s a civil war going on….every time you set out to be good, there’s something pulling on you…every time you set out to love, something keeps pulling on you trying to get you to hate. Every time you set out to be kind and say nice things…something is pulling on you to be jealous and envious and spread evil gossip…..we end up crying out with St. Augustine “Lord make me pure but not yet.” (MLK - Unfulfilled Dreams)

I'm a white guy from a white family in a white neighborhood. I guess I was fortunate in that my parents and some of my older siblings were literate about race. I got smacked twice for bad language when I was a kid: once for calling my brother a cocksucker, and once for telling Mom that Anthony and I had gone nigger-knocking (In my defense, I did not, at age seven, know what either of those words meant). While I have used the first term a time or two since then, my education was such that I have not used the second since. I'm not pretending to empathize with the African-American experience; but I do try to be conscious of my thoughts and knee-jerk reactions, and I make an honest effort to root out the prejudices I find in myself.

So why the bullshit introspection/disclaimer? I reckon if a white guy is going to start a blog post with a quote from MLK, he'd best be honest about the ground on which he stands. This post isn't about race, though. I don't have the perspective or the chops to start that discussion. I was listening to NPR today, and they were playing excerpts from some of Dr. King's last sermons and speeches. The quote above is taken from a larger context in which Dr. King stated that, "life is a continual story of shattered dreams." He referenced Gandhi's ultimate heartbreak over a divided India, and he of course masterfully framed the concept in the arena of the Civil Rights movement. What struck me, though, was the blatant and almost illicit personal narrative occurring in Dr. King's voice and delivery. The NPR narrator speculated that King could have been drawing from his own purported personal struggles with adultery, but I don't know that the specific sin matters. I think he was saying that ain't nobody all one way, and that nobody is free of the capacity for destruction and debasement, self or otherwise. It's not a clear cut struggle, either. Some days it feels like all the things you do right are made false by the miserable and compulsive joy of entertaining wrong. Lust, rage, meanness...If somewhere in my brain it's considered, then it's as surely me as any good I may ultimately do. I'm not religious. I am, in fact, allergic to religion. As a non-religious white guy from a white family in a white neighborhood, though, I would, almost, follow whatever abstraction this black preacher told me to if it illuminated a way through this struggle. Too bad the fuckers had to kill him.

Much Peace.