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A Time For Listening, Not Talking: MLK Day, 2019

Let King be King. He was a radical. A leftist. A fair amount of revisionism always occurs, because we have a way of revering without reckoning. If we weren't guilty of this, he wouldn't have had to do all the things he did.

I guess I'm not Left enough to make this case, but I'm not Right enough to ignore it, either. I do know that the motivated reasoning of nearly every PragerU video is contemptible. We sanitize those who challenge us, if we can no longer ignore them. We silence those we fear.

Anyway, if it serves the cause of justice, I'm willing to be made uncomfortable. I need not embrace every activist pet theory, especially if it denies a discernible shared reality. Yet my days of telling black people how to seek justice, or how to process feelings about justice delayed, or justice outright denied, are over.

King did not possess a graceless anger, but it was an anger. Anger was and is the proper response to injustice. Anger can be a galvanizing, organizing force. Past that point is pitiless rage, which is impossible to direct, or control.

I guess the revisionists and the progressives and all of us in between have one thing in common: We're glad Dr. King had pity on us. Pity is a species of mercy, or so it seems, and we could all use some mercy today. Mercy is not opposed to justice, but serves it, by remitting punishment that sin deserves. Mercy is the great weapon of the servants of the truth.

Happy Birthday, sir. We'll try to do better.
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