Are We Winning the Race?

Reverend Kurt Kuhwald
January 20, 2008
Palo Alto, CA

The title of this sermon is … “Are We Winning the Race?”

You know the race I’m talking about, the race to stop the destructiveness of global warming, the race to eliminate the obscene massing of wealth in the hands of a very, very small percentage of individuals (giving them an enormous, inappropriate and undeserved power over the majority of the vast peoples of the earth), the race to prevent a scorching global water drought, the race to stop up the prison pipe-line that is decimating communities of color as destructively as the institution of slavery once did, the race to … well, frighteningly, the list goes on and on. But there is one other race that I must mention that is central to them all and that is the race to establish some kind of true human equity in this society, on this planet — where humane treatment and relationships become, as Rabbi Michael Lerner, founder of the Network of Spiritual Progressives says, become a new bottom line. A bottom line, just to expand a bit, that is unafraid to declare that love, caring, generosity, kindness, celebration of the grandeur of the universe are the things that ought to be central in people’s lives.

So … I can repeat, then, the title for the day: “Are We Winning the Race?” … and I can give you the answer.

The answer is … It depends on you.

Now I can imagine that some of you are now having this internal dialogue: “Wait a minute now! It all depends on me? That’s scary. That’s overwhelming. Why, that doesn’t even make sense, I couldn’t possibly be responsible for solving all of that.”

Our task today, during this brief 20 minutes, is to come to some actual understanding of what it means to say that the resolution of today’s global dilemma does in fact depend on me, a single, limited individual — to recognize, in the depths of my being, that winning this race for human kind and the earth does in fact depend on me … even though I do not have the power to accomplish that huge work alone.

So that is the task I have set before us, the task I pledge to take on in this little Dharma Talk: To find a way to touch our true relationship with disaster and some tools by which we can cope with it.

So …

We are gathered here on the weekend in which the United States of America, and its people, celebrate the life and legacy of The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The life and legacy.

It is that legacy, that legacy that has prophetically come to haunt us, to cajole us, to reprimand us . . . it is that legacy growing out of the last years of Martin King’s life which calls us today. We dare not stop our ears. We dare not turn our gaze away from the vision, lofty in its idealism, powerful and gritty in its realism, and warmly compassionate in its recognition of the real suffering, not just of black Americans, but of all peoples and the very Earth itself.

It is a gift to be able to deeply and fully see and feel the real suffering of this world … to see the real suffering, and not be undone by it. It is a great gift of spirit to receive pain in its fullness and not be dispirited by it. Not to be undone by it, but rather to allow its energy to lift our hearts to action, to open the windows on our moral center as we turn the grief, the concern, the anguish, the painful identification … into action that comes directly from the gut through the heart and then is molded like powerful yet malleable and shining foil into words and acts of courage.

This is the legacy that we need to re-member. This is the legacy that we need to claim as our true American heritage … in this time when the real balance of life on this planet, of the viability of civilization, of the efficacy of claiming the right to exist when millions perish each day from lack of resources that are abundant in only small pockets of the social landscape — when that balance hangs with growing precariousness. And please note, when I say resources, I do not mean material goods only — though the people in Iraq, and the American South, and the Aids victims in Africa, and the millions of men and women in US prisons certainly know a lack of material resources that is denigrating and deadly.

Before I go on, I’d like to offer as an aside a small token of facts from two researchers regarding this issue of the archipelago of prisons that we wear in our country like a necklace of poison:

As of 2003, 2.2 million sentenced inmates were held in America’s adult prisons, up from 204,211 in 1973. Male prisoners account for approximately 93% of the total prison population, and approximately 60% are men of color. These statistics were taken from an article by scholar Adolphus Belk (Dellums Commission report for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies Health Policy Institute).
And second, information from the nonprofit Justice Policy Institute, at the beginning of this decade: According to official figures, the United States has the highest number of inmates in the world, followed by China and Russia. With 5 percent of the world’s population, the US has a quarter of all prisoners — 2 million out of 8 million. In addition, another 3.6 million Americans are currently on probation or parole.

What the majority of the 2 million prisoners have in common is that they come from the working class and the poorest sections of society.

Returning to the main thread of my sermon … when I say that the disparity in wealth means a disparity in resources, I do not just mean the lack of material goods, but the material lack of freedom: the lack of opportunity to determine one’s own destiny; the lack of the capacity to move freely through society without fear of assault, neither emotional nor physical; the lack of the opportunity to receive justice for crimes against one’s person and one’s property, such as toxic poisoning from industrial wastes and effluents; the withholding of adequate health care; and, the national intellectual starvation that has been induced by a media that is dishonest, greedy and cowardly.

If we want to even enter the race, let alone win it, it is incumbent upon us to own the legacy of courage, analysis and insight that challenges those crippling disparities, to make that legacy our own, to recognize in the actions of great people, such as the Reverend Dr. King, the greatness of the human heart itself … the greatness all human hearts, and that means the greatness of your heart and my heart.

One way to understand that kind of legacy, the legacy of Martin King, is to remember what his life had led him to, to bring into awareness the kinds of commitments he was making just before his death. One was the Poor People’s Campaign, the other was his resistance to the war in Iraq … excuse me, I mean Vietnam.

According to the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center in Atlanta:

Martin Luther King announced the Poor People’s Campaign … seeking a “middle ground between riots on the one hand and timid supplications for justice on the other.”

Suggested to King by Marion Wright, director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s Legal Defense and Education Fund in Jackson, Mississippi, the Poor People’s Campaign was seen by King as the next chapter in the struggle for genuine equality. Desegregation and the right to vote were essential, but King believed that African Americans and other minorities would never enter full citizenship until they had economic security. “This is a highly significant event,” King told delegates at an early planning meeting, describing the campaign as “the beginning of a new co-operation, understanding, and a determination by poor people of all colors and backgrounds to assert and win their right to a decent life and respect for their culture and dignity” (SCLC, 15 March 1968). Many leaders of American Indian, Puerto Rican, Mexican American, and poor white communities pledged themselves to the Poor People’s Campaign.

Some in SCLC thought King’s campaign too ambitious, and the demands too amorphous. King [howeverf] praised the simplicity of the campaign’s goals, saying, “Let’s find something that is so possible, so achievable, so pure, so simple that even the backlash can’t do much to deny it. And yet something so non-token and so basic to life that even the black nationalists can’t disagree with it that much” (King, 17 January 1968).

The second commitment King made was to directly and overtly oppose the war in Vietnam. Speaking at Riverside church in New York City, the archivists at the Atlanta King center wrote this:

King’s [sermon included] an historical sketch outlining Vietnam’s devastation at the hands of “deadly Western arrogance,” noting, “we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor” To King … the Vietnam War was only the most pressing symptom of American colonialism worldwide. King urged instead “a radical revolution of values” emphasizing love and justice rather than economic nationalism (King, “Beyond Vietnam,” 157).

The immediate response to King’s speech was largely negative. Both the Washington Post and New York Times published editorials criticizing the speech, with the Post noting that King’s speech had “diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country, and to his people” through a simplistic and flawed view of the situation (“A Tragedy,” 6 April 1967). … both the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and Ralph Bunche accused King of linking two disparate issues, Vietnam and civil rights. Despite public criticism, King continued to attack the Vietnam War on both moral and economic grounds.

What can we draw from these two actions by Martin King, and from his resistance to be swayed from his vision, a vision that understood that oppressions are inextricably linked, from his vision that understood, as he once said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”? How do his actions illuminate the core concern I bring to you today, that the race for global and human preservation from the forces of devastation now sweeping across our lives and the lives of all beings depends on each of us individually?

Let me list the points of his legacy that I believe are germane, that are, I think, directly and imperatively relevant:

Keep your eyes trained on the largest, most inclusive picture of injustice and of justice and be accountable to it.

As above so below: On the immediate personal level, keep your eyes trained on how you are living your life in regard to “the other,” whether they are people of a different sexual orientation, race, religion, political affiliation, etc. And: be personally, intimately and unswervingly accountable to that vision.
Risk following the truth: King went to the sanitation workers demonstration, King spoke out, fervently against the war in Vietnam, despite the fact that both of these actions were fiercely, scathingly resisted by corporate, political and military leadership, as well as many of he leaders of his own community.

Personally: Do not give up. Do not give up on your vision of the truth that you have passed, as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, through the fire of your thought; and, I would add, through the fire of your relationship with your depths and what you experience as most sacred. Do not give it up … it is the source of your very life and being.
King put the sacred, the universal, the global manifest, at the center of action by acting on his faith, faith that the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice; that is, faith that there is support for our moral vision imbedded in our very DNA, and in our souls.

Which on the most profound personal level means: trust yourself. Or, from another angle, be loyal to yourself. Therein lies true peace.

Be widely inclusive and personally accountable.
Risk the truth.
Trust yourself.

The wonderful and terrible fact is that if we do not put these points into direct practical action, intimately and personally … there is little hope for our world, while, at the same time, if we do … there is nothing that can stop us … nothing.

All My Relations.
Ashé. Amen. Ameen. Shalom & Blessed Be.
Gracias y Namasté.

Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Are We Winning the Race?