Remembering to Continue to Arc Towards Justice

It is strange to be one of the few people I know who is working in an office on this Martin Luther King day holiday, an office in a school no less.  In the past at the school where I currently work, we haven't had classes, but full-time people still had to work.  Today, under new ownership, we have classes.

Most of our programs require a certain amount of hours practicing skills, so if we didn't come to campus today, we'd need to make up the time somewhere else.  But we could do that.

I wish I could tell you that I'm one of those citizens who celebrated the federal MLK holiday with a day of service, back when I worked for schools that observed that holiday.  But usually on that Monday, I treated it as a day off.

I wish we looked to this holiday as a day to dream even bigger than service projects, to dream the way that Martin Luther King dreamed.  Like King,we could change our society. We could make it better, bending towards justice. What would that society look like?

We have to dream that dream before we can achieve it. We have to find the courage to hold tightly to our visions. We have to face down all the fire hoses, both those of our minds which inform us of the impossibility of our dreams and those of our society, that tells us to move more slowly.

But first we have to dream. Dream boldly, today of all days.

And we have to be patient and realistic. We have to realize that the work that we do may not yield results right away--perhaps not in our lifetimes. Years ago, this episode of On Being featured an interview with John Lewis, an old Civil Rights worker and a member of Congress. He ends the interview this way: "Well, I think about it, but you have to believe there may be setbacks, there may be some disappointments, there may be some interruption. But, again, you have to take the long, hard look. With this belief, it's going to be OK; it's going to work out. If it failed to happen during your lifetime, then maybe, not maybe, but it would happen in somebody's lifetime. But you must do all that you can do while you occupy this space during your time. And sometime I feel that I'm not doing enough to try to inspire another generation of people to find a way to get in the way, to make trouble, good trouble. I just make a little noise."

Today is a good day to think about how to make that noise--and to think about the next generation. History will bend in some direction: how can we help it arc towards justice?