The King Center

I am used to a swelling in my chest, where my heart might burst for joy or pride. I felt no swell, I felt a collapsing, I felt an embarrassment where I, for shame, could not look into the eyes of the people gathered around me. How could we, as a people, ever assume or conclude, something as wrong as racism was accepted, appropriate, necessary, and above all, right? How could we as a people be so misled? So poorly guided in our thinking and morals? I soon realized what was my shame could also be my victory, my victory in the beliefs upheld by people like Jesus of Nazareth, Ghandi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. The fought for the same things, responded to violence in the same ways. My strongest moments were realizations of Martin’s acts—they were so Christ-like, so self-less. The man was inspired by God, inspired by God’s means of bringing peace, of restoring order, of calling to mind what is right and good in humans. There were so many emotions: shame, embarrassment, anger, guilt, pride, humility, victory, triumph, determination, inspiration…Inspiration…I feel in my bones that I long for a cause like this one, some way to move the people, some injustice to cry out against. What are the causes I see? Our children starve themselves for this thing we have spawned into beauty, our streets are filled with the poor and homeless, complacency, selfishness, lack of concern for the good of those around us. The American Way? Whatever makes us the most comfortable, the most content, the most provided for and damn the man and damn anyone else who would try and take it from us. This is wrong, this is not the way to grow, to thrive to prosper. We sit in isolation from each other, mothers and daughters sitting in booths both attached to their cell phones—this is NOT quality time! Boyfriends and girlfriends who no longer know how to enjoy each other’s company but must whittle courting down to a quickie in the back seats of Daddy’s car. What happened to revolution? To fighting for the good of the PEOPLE? Where do people think we got music from? From people like Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, who put soul into music and let it come alive. It is from those arms that Elvis Presley was birthed and Michael Jackson and Prince. Give me blues, give me jazz, give me music that lives and breaths life and death and God, not the meaningless banter of unrequited, adulturess love and backwards relationships full of cliche phrases and pointless rhymes. He was merely emulating Moses, Jesus, he read the scriptures and really READ them. He didn’t just glance over them and say oh yes, please, I’ll take some of this and some of that and throw them in my satchel to carry along in case of a rainy day, no, he was changed. And because he was changed, we were changed, America was changed. Oh where is the persecution of the church? We must certainly be doing wrong to be on so many people’s “Yeah, they’re fine, they don’t bother me” list. Christ was RADICAL. His very presence on the earth shook the way we lived life to the very core, and hey get this, they thought the way they were living was just peachy too. I need passion, I need radical thought, life giving faith, I need URGENCY. Where is our URGENCY?