King’s Optimism & Realism amidst Temptations to Despair

Shortly before he was murdered while marching for justice with garbage workers in Memphis, Dr. King penned the following essay. There are lessons here for those tempted to despair in the difficult times we are passing through today.

People are often surprised to learn that I am an optimist. They know how often I have been jailed, how frequently the days and nights have been filled with frustration and sorrow, how bitter and dangerous are my adversaries. They expect these experiences to harden me into a grim and desperate man.

They fail, however, to perceive the sense of affirmation generated by the challenge of embracing struggle and surmounting obstacles. They have no comprehension of the strength that comes from faith in God and man.

It is possible for me to falter, but I am profoundly secure in my knowledge that God loves us; he has not worked out a design for our failure. Man has the capacity to do right as well as wrong, and his history is a path upward, not downward.

The past is strewn with the ruins of the empires of tyranny, and each is a monument not merely to man’s blunders but to his capacity to overcome them. While it is a bitter fact that in America in 1968, I am denied equality solely because I am black, yet I am not a chattel slave. Millions of people have fought thousands of battles to enlarge my freedom; restricted as it still is, progress has been made.

This is why I remain an optimist, though I am also a realist, about the barriers before us. Why is the issue of equality still so far from solution in America, a nation that professes itself to be democratic, inventive, hospitable to new ideas, rich, productive and awesomely powerful?

The problem is so tenacious because, despite its virtues and attributes, America is deeply racist and its democracy is flawed both economically and socially. All too many Americans believe justice will unfold painlessly or that its absence for black people will be tolerated tranquilly. Justice for black people will not flow into society merely from court decisions nor from fountains of political oratory. Nor will a few token changes quell all the tempestuous yearnings of millions of disadvantaged black people.

White America must recognize that justice for black people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our society. The comfortable, the entrenched, the privileged cannot continue to tremble at the prospect of change in the status quo.

There is great wisdom—as is so often the case—in these words of MLK, Jr., who paid such a price for speaking truth to power and bearing witness to it. It saddens one to think what might have happened had the country followed his leadership and taken real steps to alter the nation’s economic and social flaws. “Radical changes in the structure of our society” are still called for, and in all of us. That is where they begin after all.

A big advance in recovering the mystic or lover in each of us would be a great starting point, so that we become lovers of life with its diversity and not haters of one another. As Erich Fromm learned from the evil of the holocaust, “Necrophilia grows when biophilia is stunted.”

In his book, Beyond Religion, the Dalai Lama compares the human mind to a wild elephant. When an elephant is agitated, it can wreak great destruction. But an unruly, agitated human mind, given to fits of revenge, malice, obsessive craving, jealousy, or arrogance, can wreak even more destruction than a rampaging elephant, and can ruin lives.

To counter these passions, we need to develop very strong enthusiasm, and our “empathetic natures” are “the source of our greatest happiness.” The damaging consequences of hatred can be observed at individual, family, and global levels.*

When hatred gets enfleshed in our politics and often in the name of “immigration” (a code word for “race” today), we wreck all thought of the common good and elect politicians who mirror such hatred in us.

And we witness what is happening in America today.

*Dalai Lama, Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World, p. 126.

Banner Image: Martin Luther King Jr. addresses a crowd from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, where he delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech during the Aug. 28, 1963, march on Washington, D.C. Wikimedia Commons

Queries for Contemplation

Do you agree with the Dalai Lama that our “empathetic natures” are the “source of our greatest happiness”? And with Dr. King that radical changes in the structure of our society are (still) called for? And that to build up biophilia results in shrinking necrophilia?

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A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice

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