Let me start by saying unashamedly that you are a victim of clickbait, but I assure you it is for the most honorable of reasons, and won’t happen again.  

(And in the interests of full disclosure, I have never had anything more than a speeding ticket in my life and fully intend for it to stay that way.)  

But now that you are here, I hope you will do me the honor of continuing to read below.  I am confident it will be time well spent.

The title of this month’s blog post was inspired by my recent reading of Martin Luther King’s book Why We Can’t Wait that was published in January 1964.  Among my many wishes for our country, I wish I could get every American to read it.  It’s chock full of relevancy for modern times.    

In it he recounts the efforts of the Civil Rights Movement in 1963 and one of the chapters is a reprint of his famous Letter From a Birmingham Jail that he wrote in Spring 1963 in response to a joint Op-Ed by other religious leaders around the country who while speaking supportively of the overall concept of the movement felt that MLK’s and the SCLC’s (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) efforts were essentially out of line (my wording).  

Many times while reading it (the whole book is only about 200 pages) I found myself reading it in his voice, and was moved to more than an occasional tear imagining what it must have been like to have gone through what they went through as civil rights protestors, from fire hoses, to police dogs being ordered to bite child participants, to just everyday life being treated as second class citizens, or much much worse for 300+ years, and somehow still finding the strength within themselves to consciously turn towards the light, to expect good things to happen in life, to still love this country and want to be a part of it.  

I imagined myself sitting in the jail cell with MLK that spring of 1963, cut off from his leadership team and all information, wondering how things were going, if the supporters were losing heart, and then at his lowest point, reading that Op-Ed from people he respected, and wondering where things went from there. 

It is so true that we cannot connect the dots looking forward in life, only backwards, and while he was a man of supreme faith, in God and in his fellow human beings, I’m sure he must have been restless to some degree wondering what the future would hold.  

Could he have imagined that in a few short months the March on Washington would be taking place?  Or that a few months after that the President would be assassinated?  Or that in a little over a year he would see the 1964 Civil Rights Bill passed into law?

I suspect that one thing he did know with every fiber of his being was that he had to keep pressing forward for as long as it took, and as long as he could, however he was able to, because the second you give up trying, the injustices you are fighting against win.  

I have so much empathy for the man, his family, his loved ones, his supporters and colleagues, for what he and they had to endure while he was alive and then to lose him, a giant of nonviolence, to an assassin’s bullet, and in the prime of his life with young children.  

It is devastating to me, a 48 year old white father of a 16 year old in the year 2024 living in the Deep South.  I cannot begin to imagine the devastation, grief, and other myriad of emotions felt by those who knew and worked with and loved him at the time.   

In the days since reading the book, as I’ve reflected on what I read, I cannot help but feel in some ways that I too am in a sort of jail, that all of us are in a jail, partly of our own creation, wherever we live in the country.  

How many times have we all seen funny videos of a dog that thinks a sliding glass door is closed and refuses to walk through it until someone proves to them that it is open?  

From Kauai to Key West, a pestilence of partisanship has salted our fertile land and would have us believe that our purple mountains majesty are hopelessly divided between red or blue. 

MLK believed that “public opinion is not in a rigid mold.  American political thought is not committed to conservatism, nor radicalism, nor moderation.  It is above all, fluid.  As such, it contains trends, not hard lines, and affirmative leadership can lead it to constructive channels.”

In the equally moving afterword, printed in 1999, Jesse Jackson calls on us the readers to honor MLK’s work and legacy everyday in our own lives, and I cannot help but feel that one way of doing that is to refuse to accept the continuing injustices of the two party system.  

A system which segregates and divides.  A system that does not reward merit, but fear.  A system that relies on our continued apathy and acceptance of the status quo for its continued existence and lack of true competition.  

When enough of us realize that the sliding glass door is open, our nation will finally stride confidently across the threshold into the promised land our founding generation hoped and dreamed about almost 250 years ago. 

A land where we never forget, even in our worst of times, that we have more in common than we do that divides us and live our lives accordingly.  

A land where it’s expected and demanded that our officials from opposing parties be servant leaders that act maturely and selflessly to proactively solve problems facing the masses.

A land who’s residents can disagree agreeably on even the most emotional of topics.  

In that Op-Ed the other religious leaders called MLK an extremist, and as he mentions in his book “though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label.  The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists will we be.  Will we be extremists for hate or for love?  Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice?  Perhaps the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.” 

From this day forward I hope you will join me in considering yourself to be a creative extremist of love and justice.  I already considered myself a radical centrist, but I will gladly and proudly add creative extremist to the list.  

MLK called the Civil Rights Movement ‘the third revolution’ in America, after the Revolutionary War and the Civil War.  

As the more egregious injustices in our nation fall by the wayside over the centuries, the remaining injustices can seem less and less obvious, less and less urgent, even though they are no less pervasive than the other injustices were.    

It is my belief that the continuation of the two party system, which is not mentioned in our Declaration of Independence nor in the Constitution, is the biggest remaining injustice in America, and that fixing it will be the key that finally unlocks the last shackles of segregation and sets all of our people free from the poisonous prison of partisanship.