lay wrench upon the come-unfixed
Now that the day has passed, it's no longer as much of a disrespect to Dr. King to point out one of his movement's--and his--greatest failures, which is the unavoidable side-effect of pointing out one of its--and his--great heroes.
Which is to say, all due--and that's a great deal of--respect to the Reverend Dr. King, but do yourself a favor and do some searches on the name Bayard Rustin.
When we deify our heroes, we make them harder to emulate. We all come from somewhere, and we all make mistakes, and that doesn't make any of us incapable of great work for our fellows. No one is perfect, nor is anyone an island, and it's the collective work of the lot of us that will make the difference in the face of a world against whose slings and arrows none of us can prevail alone. How many times have you heard someone say, Well, I'm not Gandhi. Or, It's not like I'm Mother Teresa. Or, especially in this country, Who do you think I am, Martin Luther King?
No. You're you, as wondrous and flawed and sacred and fucked-up a person as any of them were. They, like you, ate and swore and lied and ached and fought and sighed and laughed and used the bathroom and stumbled over and over. They utterly depended on the support and labor of many others whose names we don't remember so well. And elementary-school encapsulations aside, you and I know full well that having a dream isn't enough and never was. We canonize people who've broken the barrier of denial and put their entirely human strength into moving the world, and in the process fictionalize them, box their messages in tiny civics-class soundbites, make them legends who were never Us. Who're over, who don't breathe any more, who sit on pages and pediments to be dusted off once a year at best and paid lip service to. One of my credos, as a proud member of the Religious Left, is the old saying, when you pray, move your feet. Sometimes that's the sly shuffle of a satisfied dancer, sometimes the march of many united, sometimes the elegant tango hisses and angry stomps and familiar footfalls in the hallway that make love and family and frustration and forward, but the movement has to be there, and the movement has to keep moving.
The "Civil Rights Era" is a nonsense meant to allow us to sit on our laurels and look back as a time when everything got better than worse. Well, it's got some more bettering to do. And if my heroes are human, I can learn both from their triumphs and their mistakes.
My dance, as far as I can dance it, as far as I can march it, wants everyone on board who wants in. As Desmond Tutu said: "All. All, all, all, all, all. All."
Or, if you prefer Allen Ginsberg: "America, I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel."
Which is to say, all due--and that's a great deal of--respect to the Reverend Dr. King, but do yourself a favor and do some searches on the name Bayard Rustin.
When we deify our heroes, we make them harder to emulate. We all come from somewhere, and we all make mistakes, and that doesn't make any of us incapable of great work for our fellows. No one is perfect, nor is anyone an island, and it's the collective work of the lot of us that will make the difference in the face of a world against whose slings and arrows none of us can prevail alone. How many times have you heard someone say, Well, I'm not Gandhi. Or, It's not like I'm Mother Teresa. Or, especially in this country, Who do you think I am, Martin Luther King?
No. You're you, as wondrous and flawed and sacred and fucked-up a person as any of them were. They, like you, ate and swore and lied and ached and fought and sighed and laughed and used the bathroom and stumbled over and over. They utterly depended on the support and labor of many others whose names we don't remember so well. And elementary-school encapsulations aside, you and I know full well that having a dream isn't enough and never was. We canonize people who've broken the barrier of denial and put their entirely human strength into moving the world, and in the process fictionalize them, box their messages in tiny civics-class soundbites, make them legends who were never Us. Who're over, who don't breathe any more, who sit on pages and pediments to be dusted off once a year at best and paid lip service to. One of my credos, as a proud member of the Religious Left, is the old saying, when you pray, move your feet. Sometimes that's the sly shuffle of a satisfied dancer, sometimes the march of many united, sometimes the elegant tango hisses and angry stomps and familiar footfalls in the hallway that make love and family and frustration and forward, but the movement has to be there, and the movement has to keep moving.
The "Civil Rights Era" is a nonsense meant to allow us to sit on our laurels and look back as a time when everything got better than worse. Well, it's got some more bettering to do. And if my heroes are human, I can learn both from their triumphs and their mistakes.
My dance, as far as I can dance it, as far as I can march it, wants everyone on board who wants in. As Desmond Tutu said: "All. All, all, all, all, all. All."
Or, if you prefer Allen Ginsberg: "America, I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel."
Labels: religion, unifying theory
posted by little light | 8:35 PM
1 Comments:
"Our job is not to get those people who dislike us to love us. Nor was our aim in the civil rights movement to get prejudiced white people to love us. Our aim was to try to create the kind of America, legislatively, morally, and psychologically, such that even though some whites continued to hate us, they could not openly manifest that hate. That's our job today: to control the extent to which people can publicly manifest anti-gay sentiment."
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