On Martin Luther King Day, let us recommit to justice

I realized today that I'd never read Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter from a Birmingham Jail.I rectified that and found so, so much in there that rings just as true today. Sadly.The letter is, of course eloquent and impassioned. One passage, in particular, resonated deeply

I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

— Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr.

This country has a trouble past, present and future, particularly when it comes to civil rights. Born of an ideal, "all men are created equal," this country has rarely, if ever, truly embodied that. But it has tried to. Sometimes it has done so ahead of other nations; at other times, it has run to keep up with others.Even the Biblical phrase that has often been used to describe our democratic experiment, "a city upon a hill" (most notably used by the Puritan John Winthrop and President Ronald Reagan), represents more what might be than what we are. A city on a hill is visible to all; it cannot hide its blemishes. Try as we might, our nation has never been able to hide from the gaze of the world.We aren't as much a melting pot as a stew pot. People of all backgrounds, religions, ethnicities, races, cultures, economic status come here and came here. Even as our own struggled in poverty, we still allowed in others who had not a penny to their names - though the decisions of who we would let in were mired in the same racial politics as everything else.Once upon a time, Italian immigrants were at the bottom of the social heap. Now, you can't go anywhere in America without finding a pizzeria and, probably, an Olive Garden. We can argue whether Olive Garden is authentic Italian food or not, but it is certainly Italian-American food, and it shows the integration of a once-despised immigrant class into society.Of course, Italian and Irish immigrants, who both were once considered undesirable, were able to melt into American society. They are, after all, white. African-Americans whose forebears were slaves cannot merge so easily with the majority. Nor should they have to. It is incumbent upon us to get over our damn selves and recognize that even though slavery has gone, the discrimination that kept it going for so long never went away.It never went away, because we, as a nation, refused to talk about it. For whatever reason, the feelings of our white brothers and sisters in the South were considered more important to take into consideration than doing right by those who had been enslaved or, later, kept segregated from us.And now, 150 or so years later, are we any closer to bridging that divide? In some ways, yes. But in so many ways, no.And 50 or so years after Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his famous letter, why do passages like this still ring as true as they day he put them to paper?

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with.

Let us see it. And deal with it. And fix it.Photo by PBS NewsHour via Flickr Creative Commons.