Standing on the Side of Love

Dear Ones,

I’m writing to you as a recently minted trustee for UUCA, on the eve of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day — the same day the chief justice will swear in the next president of the United States. It strikes me as a strange and dissonant moral coincidence, a day scheduled to honor two such vastly different public figures.

The forecast is calling for bitterly cold weather, and I believe a lot of us are feeling the chill. We know we stand on the side of love, no matter where you come from, no matter your history or your heritage; we’ve stood together in the Sanctuary and lifted every voice and sang: Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around…turn me around…. Yet many of us also expect some frank challenges to our values in the months ahead. The incoming president has told us what he wants to accomplish, and the mind races. State ownership of the media? Mass deportation of the undocumented? Reproductive choice curtailed still further? Armed men called to arrest those who gather in protest when citizens’ civil and constitutional rights are violated?

If all this sounds like hyperbole: it was only a generation ago that the Commissioner of Public Safety of Birmingham, Alabama — white supremacist Bull Connor — ordered fire hoses and police attack dogs against civil rights activists, and jailed hundreds including scores of minors (ages 6-17) who were charged as vagrants so they could be denied access to attorneys and family members for three days. Connor later led the Alabama delegation to the Democratic National Committee, where they walked out over the committee’s move to include a plank for civil rights in the national platform. American leaders are fully capable of supreme acts of injustice and cowardice dressed up as “toughness.” Too many of our fellow citizens would participate in similar acts, or look the other way. Diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts are being dismantled everywhere. And so for me tonight, Dr. King’s words in his final public speech the evening before his assasination ring louder than before. “I don’t know what will happen now,” he said. “We’ve got some difficult days ahead.”

Personally, I can’t bear to let blatant injustice stand. If (for example) we allow U.S. agencies to separate families at the southern border, losing hundreds of children in the process, and lock people up without due process into the huge new detention facilities that will be needed for mass deportation — I will stand up and work to stop it. Any of us may arrive at a moment or a situation where we have to put down our regular activities and take up something new and urgent for brothers and sisters threatened with extreme mistreatment. Until then — on the eve of a discouraging inauguration — I take inspiration from some less well-known words of King’s from that same speech delivered his last night on Earth:

“Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness. Let us rise up with a greater readiness. Let us stand with a greater determination. And let us move on in these powerful days, these days of challenge, to make America what it ought to be. We have an opportunity to make America a better nation.”

Let us push back along the moral arc of the universe with the weight of history, truth, justice for all — standing on the side of love.