After reading about fifty of your responses to the M.L. King quotation, I have to admit that my eyes got a bit glazed over, but I began asking myself what I would have written in response to that quote. What follows is more like my notes for a full paper, not a polished essay. First, here is the original prompt:
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said:
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
Dr. King was a pacifist and believed that hatred and prejudice could be fought with love. Do you agree with him? Do you think that in all situations a peaceful response is the correct one?
As a teacher, I want to deal with two things that seemed to cause a lot of fuzzy thinking in some of those papers I read. The first is a definition problem; the second is a misreading of the prompt (which I must confess I did as well).
Definition problem
There is a big difference between “hatred” and using necessary force. Police officers often need to restrain unruly citizens and in extreme cases to use deadly force, but that does not mean they are acting from hatred. In fact, all of us who are in positions of authority—parents, teachers, and so on—sometimes need to take unpleasant action. We send uncooperative children to their room without dessert. We give failing grades to students who do not do their work. We fire employees who steal from the company. These actions are not necessarily from hatred.
You can see the difference when you watch videos of police officers. The officer who handcuffs a person and guides him into the back seat of the cruiser, putting a hand on the person’s head so he does not get injured while getting in, is a very different creature from the one who pumps ten rounds into a citizen who has been disarmed and is lying face-down in the street. I would call the second an act of hatred, but that is not an example of good police work.
Because King was a Baptist pastor, I think it is appropriate to include Christian theology in this discussion. When the prophet John the Baptist was preaching in the wilderness, his main message was about repenting and turning away from sin. Soldiers asked him, “What about us? What are we to do?” John’s answer was “Don’t take money from anyone by force or accuse anyone falsely. Be content with your pay.” (Luke 3:14) The daily work of a soldier often includes getting law-breakers to do things they don’t want to do, but John thought it was OK to keep being soldiers—just do it right.
Misreading the prompt
This happens to all of us, and it is a good reason we should always start early on any writing project and, if possible, get feedback from others. The original question was not about general use of force. For example, it did not ask whether it is OK to confront someone who steals my car or whether it is OK to call the police to deal with a domestic violence problem. (I have to admit that I jumped too quickly on this one.)
The real question was whether hatred and prejudice could be fought with love. That is a very different question.
In that context, it is interesting to compare the outcomes from “Bloody Sunday” in Selma, Alabama (March 7, 1965), and the protests and riots in Ferguson, Missouri, which began on August 10, 2014. The Selma response by the Black community essentially followed King’s advice and to a large extent got what they were asking for: the Federal Voting Rights Act and a large measure of public sympathy. The Ferguson riots, which included a lot of violence and property damage, did not accomplish nearly so much: people were injured and killed, and the term “Ferguson Effect” has become well-known: Officers are less inclined to. engage in proactive policing due to fear of negative publicity, scrutiny, lack of support, or public condemnation, while the criminal element feels empowered and has become more brazen. In this situation, King seems to be right. Hatred and violence confronted hatred and violence, and nothing really got better.
The illustration of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37) fits the discussion of hatred and prejudice.
The setup of the parable was that a lawyer asked Jesus what was necessary to receive eternal life. The answer, as most of us know, is to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself. The lawyer, being a lawyer, wanted to get off the hook, and asked “Who is my neighbor?” (The guy next door? The guy on the next street?) This is where it gets interesting. Jews thought of Samaritans as mortal enemies: politically wrong religious heretics. In the story a Jewish man is beaten and robbed, and several of his good Jewish countrymen go out of their way to avoid helping, but the Samaritan is the one who helps, though it is expensive and inconvenient. The idea of “love,” in this case is not a warm fuzzy feeling of bunnies and daisies. It is the hard, messy, expensive work of bandaging wounds, loading an injured man on the Samaritan’s own animal, taking him to an inn, and paying for his care.
We never hear about the rest of the Samaritan’s story. That road was not one for pleasure trips, so presumably he was traveling on business and this whole incident punched quite a hole in his schedule and his purse. We do know that he even promised to cover any additional expenses when he returned, and there was no mention of any payback from the victim.
The other story we do not hear is what the Jewish man said to the people back home. That is the important one for the discussion of King’s comment. I cannot imagine that hatred would flourish after the Jewish man was rescued and tended to by one of those terrible Samaritans. That’s really Dr. King’s point. It is really difficult to continue hating people who care for you, bandage your wounds, pay for your recovery, and ask nothing in return. In some small way, the animosity between Jews and Samaritans dialed down that day.
Going back to the original question: Can hatred and prejudice be fought with love? Yes, but it’s really difficult. The natural reaction is to meet hatred and prejudice with more hatred and prejudice. That’s the easy path. But I cannot think of any time when that makes the hatred and prejudice diminish. The hard road is the right one.
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