If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
But if I am only for myself, what am I?
And if not now, when?
Hillel, Pirkei Avot 1:14
To some, Martin Luther King, Jr., 1929-1968, was a saint or a hero. Here at Crablaw, we are disinclined to make any human being a hero or saint, viewing the majority of the human race as standing, as it were, between the 45-yard lines of morality at best. We need not look upon King as a saint or a hero, however, to ask ourselves - what have we done for justice lately?
If a totalitarian regime were to take over the United States and imprison all persons engaged in activities aimed at the protection of individual liberty and fundamental fairness for all, who among us would have produced enough evidence to convict ourselves?
A fact often overlooked in the hagiography of King is his youth. Not only was he assassinated, but at a fairly young age. I am 36, and King did not make it to 40. Makes me wonder personally whether I will look back and see myself as actually having exerted an effort to do something meaningful, something truly good. While I can look at my children as truly good, and perhaps use them as an excuse not to do be engaged, Martin Luther King was a father as well as a minister, organizer, activist, orator and Nobel Prize winner.
One thinks of the White Rose, the small but powerful anti-fascist student organization at the University of Munich that resisted Hitler and the Third Reich through incendiary, morally charged leaflets (in pre-xerox days) left at telephone booths and the like. They were in their early twenties, knowing full well that the death penalty awaited them if they were caught. White Rose leader Sophie Scholl told her executioners just she was beheaded, "your heads will roll too." The war crimes trials a few years later proved her symbolically and to some extent literally correct. Scholl has a level of reverence in Germany comparable to that of the King here; polls identify her as the most important German woman of the 20th Century.
Good is not merely the absence of active, predatory evil. We are not good people by minding our own business, by avoiding violations of the rights of others. That is more or less enough to avoid making us evil, but it is not enough to make us good. If we want to be good we must exert an effort, sometimes a monumental effort to do good, sometimes risking a great deal at the same time.
Consider a child. It is evil to tell a child that he or she is garbage, since that idea will lead to the child becoming self-destructive or resentful, will harm the child. To do good, however, requires an exertion to build the child up into a loving, responsible human being. Just refraining from evil is not enough; in fact, it is neglect.
We may wish to consider as well that King died while supporting a picket line of striking Memphis garbage collectors who were striking due to, among other issues, hazardous working conditions within the trucks. African-American workers were required to work inside the trash tanks of the trucks, and one worker's death by a truck's crushing machine was a major catalyst for the strike. While we remember King for his eloquence on the marble steps of the Mall, his career took him more often to unglamorous events like spring-time garbage strikes in Tennessee. Doing good is often not dramatic or flashy or telegenic.
When we consider the bravery and moral courage of such people as King or Sophie Scholl or the like, we can be tempted to put them up high, like Catholic saints whose relics and garments and eyelashes and toenails are sacred objects. If we start from the assumption, however, that most people line up between the 45-yard lines, we can assume that some or all of our commonly recognized moral giants were not necessarily giants, but perhaps more ordinary people who were only a few yards ahead of us, enough to show us a reachable example.
That latter possibility - that heroism is not for "saints" but for us - should both inspire and frighten us.
-- Bruce Godfrey
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