King’s Sermon About the Fool
As 2008 comes to a close and we look forward to a new year, a new president, and a renewed sense of optimism across the United States, despite the economic realities of the moment, I feel compelled to consider once again the potential future that we can begin to build. In my capacity as director of Puentes, I have found myself grappling with universal issues of love, understanding and equity in the face of immediate human injustices. I have found myself reflecting often about how to bring concepts from the abstract into working, doable models that create shared possibilities for us today and tomorrow.
For the past year I have been thinking about and exploring these ideas within an organizational, municipal, regional, statewide, and even national context, and in doing so have slowly begun to articulate in my blogs a push for the creation of a true integration model for our local, state and national community. A good friend and mentor, who knows that I am looking at these issues in particular from the viewpoint of a naturalized immigrant and the son of immigrants, offered me a book containing Martin Luther King, Jr.’s early sermons. Compelling and well written, these sermons are jewels for anyone interested in understanding the foundation of King’s nonviolent civil rights actions. More importantly, for me, they served as headlights on a dark, unfamiliar highway. One sermon, in particular, “The Man Who Was a Fool,” helped me understand more fully King’s concept of integration.
In concluding part two of this sermon, King states that “all life is interrelated…. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.” This is an incredibly powerful statement that if taken into serious account in our public systems, in our business practices, in our public health infrastructure and all systems that touch, or have an impact on, human lives would yield far better policies than we have seen so far. In a society that takes such interrelation into account, there would be less need for discriminatory, prejudicial and hate-filled policies, such as our local moratoriums on multi-family housing, or the evictions on taco trucks, or the relative-only laws surrounding land purchase, and so on.
Life is interrelated, King said. That is a hard one to swallow, and even harder to place into practice. Since King’s death, the goal of establishing an integrated society has languished. In another of his sermons, King articulated his vision for the Civil Rights movement in this fashion: “Court orders and federal enforcement agencies are of inestimable value in achieving desegregation, but desegregation is only a partial, though necessary, step toward the final goal, which we seek to realize, genuine inter-group and interpersonal living.” Can you look around you today and say that we have achieved this goal? Can you say that the United States of America upholds all of the truths stated in its Declaration of Independence and its Constitution? Can your state, or your region, or your city honestly say that its policies afford, support, and create a way of life, a quality of life, that is of this caliber? Can we even begin to answer this if we don’t understand what true inter-group, interpersonal living looks like?
King’s sermon about the fool speaks of the fool who, through hard work, was able to amass hordes of riches. Upon celebrating his vast wealth by creating large stores of it for his own personal future, the man dies. The story is a biblical lesson that teaches how any outcome in our lives is dependent upon more than just our own personal labor. The rich man was called a fool because he failed to see that the great wealth he had amassed was only made possible because of a large community around him that played its part in helping him, either directly or indirectly, become wealthy. King argues that communities, cities, and countries can play the role of the fool when they fail to see that their very survival and success is dependent upon the success of all around them. In New Orleans, as in many places in the United States, but particularly the Deep South, the black-white divide that has historically afflicted our communities continues to plague us in a way that kills growth, stifles healthy communities, drowns hope for a better future for all, and leaves little to nothing to everyone else on the sidelines. As a Latino raised in the Deep South, I believe that we have an obligation to ourselves to help shift this dialogue into something more fruitful for every person who lives within this region. Clearly, the seeds of prior policies have borne nothing more than rotten fruits. Is it not time we try a new way, however difficult?
Is it not time that we look at what the world might be like if we could change our dialogue from one of accusation, fear and prejudice to one of acceptance, openness and understanding? To create a world in which true inter-group, interpersonal living shapes our public policies and our communities is to create a world in which the interdependence that the fool does not recognize becomes loud and clear. In such a world, the community understands that the criminal act of a human being is not only possible because of the single action of the individual, but also because of the many actions of the community surrounding the individual. If we understand this, then our prescription to the problem, our remedy, our justice, looks far different than the type of justice offered today. In such a world, the community understands that the undocumented immigrant in this country is a human being who has arrived on our doorstep as a result of the actions of many different communities, including our own, affecting his life. If we recognize this, our reaction to his presence looks different. In such a world, the community sees the less fortunate and downtrodden among its own not as a burden on the system, but as a reflection of a poorly functioning system.
So the question remains, how do we get there? I don’t know, but I do know that we have to start the work, start the journey, and start reaching milestones towards the goal. The 21st century us upon us, and I think it’s time we evolve past our traditional differences and setbacks and grow into a new possibility. We can start now, in slow, sometimes painful steps. No matter what, it will be better for our children if we start than if we fail to even consider it.
Tags: hispanic, hispanic community, hispanic louisiana, hispanic new orleans, immigration, immigration reform, latino new orleans, latinola, louisiana, lucas diaz, martin luther king jr, new orleans, puentes, puentes director