Usually the most pressing concern on my mind, whenever there is a national holiday on a Monday, is Will Aldi Be Open? Monday is the day that we quietly crash into the ground and then painstakingly stand up again, and the day I wander up and down those hallowed aisles, praising God for German chocolate and sauerkraut. Then I toddle home and sit around pushing Elphine through her homework. When the whole world has a holiday, I find my gentle routine discombobulated and my soul irritated that everyone didn’t go to work.
But today, I see, is MLK day and so I have a modicum of guilt to go with my discombobulation, because I always mean to instruct the children in the historical weightiness of the day, to let them know someone somewhere did something bigger than them. The guilt is because I don’t do school on Monday, and usually by Tuesday the magic has gone.
And overlaying both of those, there is some true sorrow, because, as more people than I have noticed, the heritage and preaching of Martin Luther King has been thoroughgoingly sinned against. You can’t look at my neighborhood and the heavy weight of troubles here and say that what he hoped for has really come to pass. I spent a fair amount of time yesterday waving my arms and careening back and forth across the theological and philosophical landscape. There are grave systemic injustices rolling down like a torrentially mighty flood that I cannot, in my single roiling sphere, dam up or bind up or anything.
A pointingly insightful friend pointed out that MLK day is always the same week as the March for Life. What a perfect subversion. The day when the civil rights of all people are celebrated, when this country came to grips with the fact that even the lives of black people matter, is right the same moment when we could, if we wanted to, look into the gaping maw of the death of an entire generation, a lost generation that would have helped to make a minority into practically a majority. All those black and minority lives, lost, chucked away.
I’ve been trying to understand how we got here. Because, as someone else pointed out, nobody does what they believe to be evil. Everyone does the thing they think good. Hitler managed to make the German people (not every individual, certainly, but the culture as a whole) believe that one element of the population was a disease, that everyone would be healthier if that segment wasn’t there. But what of abortion? How did we, culturally, come to believe that it is better individually and corporately, for many many many babies not to see the light of day? People don’t wake up in the morning, for the most part, saying to themselves, ‘how can I wreck everything?’ No, each person wants to do good for themselves. Somehow the choice against the child, even the black child, has to be perceived as good and right. This article, Is Sex
Necessary, helped me immensely to begin to have an answer. It’s long, and worthy of a careful read, and towards the end he says,
“In the light of all that, we should not be surprised if many of the big issues in liberal politics today are downstream from sexual liberation. ‘Abortion rights,’ gay marriage, the LGBT agenda are causes that under certain circumstances reflect genuine concern for our common humanity as well as common sense about the limits of morality, law, and custom. But they are all too often espoused in a spirit of radical non-compromise. They are seen as ways in which sex can be detached from the civilizing institutions that have expressed and tempered it, and attached to the liberation of ‘me.'”
You can’t tease away the issue of race, today, from all the other cultural threads. That black babies die every day is sickeningly real. That black marriage is assaulted and ruined is incontrovertible. The heritage of the civil rights moment is crashing and breaking apart on the rocks of identity politics. And many people, like me, stand by, ringing my hands and flailing.
Today, rather than a celebrating, I think I’m going to mourn, and weep, and also pray, because well, God is bigger than me, and this, and the way of the cross is the only way to life, for anyone.
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