Now is the Time

“This the day to shape the days upon.”
--from The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

“Change is inevitable and a dimension of time itself.”
--from A Way of Seeing, by Margaret Mead and Rhoda Metraux

“The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”
--Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

Now is the Time

On August 23, 1963 when the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., gathered together with approximately 250,000 other Americans—black and white—in Washington, D.C., under the symbolic gaze of Presidents Washington and Lincoln, he did not know that in four short years an act of violence would claim his life. He did not know about that particular future, but he knew about the past. And on that August day, the Reverend King reminded this assembly of souls—250,000 strong—of the promise made by our government 100 years earlier when President Lincoln legitimized (and sanctified) the freedom of “all persons held as slaves…thenceforward and forever” by signing the Emancipation Proclamation. And while The Reverend did not know the specific future, he had a dream for it, “a dream deeply rooted in the American dream,” and thereby a common dream.

As I reread the text of the speech Martin Luther King delivered that summer day almost 45 years ago, I recognize in it King’s acknowledgement of our tragic past and his hope for our future. But, even more than this--and perhaps as the ultimate reminder of the eternal nature of time--I hear in his speech the message of today.

“I have a dream today.”

I read this and I cannot help but think and feel and believe that this man was speaking to that crowd then, on that day, as well as to me now, on this day.

Today.

King stood, then, in the hallowed presence of Washington and Lincoln “to remind America of the fierce urgency of now” and to remind us that “Now, (again), is the time to make real the promises of democracy.”

Now. Was there ever more an eternal word?

In his journal entry of June 16, 1854, just about one decade shy of Lincoln’s Emancipation address to Congress, the American writer Henry David Thoreau wrote of his disgust for his fellow Northerners when the state of Massachusetts chose to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act and returned Anthony Burns, a fugitive slave, to the South and, thus, to slavery. And although it was the last time the Fugitive Slave Act was enforced in that state, Thoreau’s journal entry illustrates his incredulity of the event “to see men going about their business as if nothing had happened.” Here is the man who penned the essay Civil Disobedience that influenced Ghandi and King, and I would have to believe Lincoln, as well. The man who reminds us in this journal entry, as King did, and Lincoln did, as Ghandi and others have done: “The effect of a good government is to make life more valuable.”

Indeed.

Now is the time. Do you hear that?

Last month when Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama—both democratic presidential hopefuls, both front runners for the ticket, and both not only speaking in defense of change but definitive representations of it—became ensnarled in the politics of language and politics about a comment Senator Clinton made regarding The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., I had to hold my breath and my tongue, which is something, admittedly, I do not always do, something I certainly recognize as sometimes difficult to do, and something I sincerely wish the pundits, and press, and public would do more routinely. But, I suppose, if we look at the presidential race purely as a winner take all proposition, then the fighting gloves are, unfortunately for us all, not too far out of reach. While Clinton, as a consummate politician—and there are pros and cons to that particular descriptor—recognized that without President Lyndon Johnson’s signature, the Civil Rights Act would not have been passed, I do not believe that she intended to diminish the life, work, or legacy of Martin Luther King when she said “It took a president to get it done.” Neither do I believe that she was attempting to draw a color line that would suggest one color to be more effective than any other in the political court. But, then again, you could make a case that undoubtedly would hold true if you were to say that I am not terribly savvy when it comes to politics.

However, this much I think I do know, or, at the very least, I can connect the dots between the writing and speeches of Thoreau and Lincoln, between the words and rhetoric of Ghandi and the British Prime Ministers, and between all that MLK worked and spoke and marched for and the ultimate action of LBJ. “The effect of a good government is to make life more valuable.” Yes. Yes. And yes. And good government needs the voices of those like Thoreau and Ghandi and King of you and of me to be reminded that we are, indeed, inhabitants of today and of yesterday and of tomorrow.

If there ever was a time, it is once again, Now the time….