Until Justice Rolls Down Like Waters
Yesterday, like many of you, we honored Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy with a day of service for the greater good. As I reflected on the holiday here in Zambia, I wanted to share my thoughts with you.
After a Herculean effort alongside community members in scorching heat, we laid a few rows of bricks on 2 houses and dug out less than half of a pit latrine. Big deal, right? What’s the point of coming all this way to do a little work? It doesn’t fix anything. Well, it doesn’t fix anything right away.
Dr. King said that “the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I agree, but we need to go a step further: someone has to do the bending, it won’t just happen by itself. With that said, it takes a great deal of faith to work for good, since the short term results are often nonexistent or minimal, while the long term possibilities may seem unimaginable. Take, for example, the college students, who were threatened, beaten and even killed while trying to register black voters during Freedom Summer in 1964. They couldn’t have imagined the day when America would elect a black President, but they had faith that, if they participated in the work, it could happen. What seems impossible at any point in time can be achieved later on, but that won’t happen without the passionate dedication and selfless sacrifice of those who come before and work for the change that only future generations will benefit from.
The beauty of Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream is that it is unachievable, at least in our lifetime. Beyond the needs of African-Americans, King dedicated his life to eradicating all forms of poverty, violence and prejudice all over the world. With that as our lens, we cannot say his dream has been achieved today. His dream is of a world that has never been and seems like it will never be, but that current impossibility should not discourage us. For, what King saw from the mountaintop was that we as a people will get to the Promised Land, if those of us who are here now can use our time to lay the building blocks and the foundation for a better future. A future in which his ideal of a beloved community—united in peace, equality, justice and love for all people—is not only possible, it’s a reality.
What we do now won’t fix the problems we face, but it can lay the ground work so that we as a people shall overcome in the future. Our work today won’t solve the access to housing problem in Zambia, but it will construct a few houses that wouldn’t otherwise exist and empower a few families who would not have been able to own a home without the efforts of the Periclean Scholars group. We can never know what the full impact of that work will be, but only have faith that our efforts will combine with those of others to someday create the change we seek.
There is plenty of happiness at the end of a hard day’s work for good, but, if we seek to follow Dr. King, we know that we cannot be content until we have reached that Promised Land. As he said in his “I Have A Dream” Speech, “no, no, we are not satisfied and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream!”