Earlier this week I was writing about how America looks and feels from abroad and totally forgot that Monday was the holiday to honor Martin Luther King Jr. Ironic and embarrassing, my own concern with, “what am I gonna clank out today?” blinded me to a most important subject right in front of me.
I lost a healthy part of today re-reading and re-listening to King’s work. If you do not know “Letter from the Birmingham City Jail” or his sermon against Vietnam in the Riverside Church, both are brilliant and worth the time.
Here’s a famous passage from the sermon:
We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
And today I was struck by this in the “Letter From Birmingham:”
We can never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was "illegal."
King is explaining the difference between a just law and a law that is not just.
Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority
In an excellent article, The Atlantic reports how voter suppression laws may well enable Republicans to seize and hold on to power “legally” in a fashion Hitler would applaud.
But here I want to make a turn to think about our current version of segregation. Because you can feel it--right?--not just in neighborhoods or by race or income, as primarily concerned King, and not just politically, but also temperamentally and also in how we tribe up online. And, as I want to address, in ourselves.
Obviously, people chanting “Jews will not replace us” have exactly the false sense of superiority King means. So I am not saying the chief element of the segregation he pointed to has dissipated. Just the opposite.
But today we also all have a false sense of our own superiority and of our own inferiority. Indeed, isn’t that a chief impact of the internet? To spend all day looking up to and also down on everyone else?
That segregation from ourselves is not a greater danger than corrupt rhetoric or the racism, materialism, and militarism of a thing-oriented society, let alone of bad actors cynically passing unjust laws to undo democracy. But the up and down of this problem, or perhaps I should say “the up and down problem,” is something I’d like to start to consider tomorrow.
Tomorrow, or a day like it.
“today we also all have a false sense of our own superiority and of our own inferiority. Indeed, isn’t that a chief impact of the internet? To spend all day looking up to and also down on everyone else?”… such an astute observation and so important to consider as we attempt to claw our way out of competition, speed, and materialism. Wonderful post.