If it be not to come it will be now

Last night I spent a few hours on my couch trying to rest my weary lungs. Some channel surfing landed on a news clip from Martin Luther King, Jr. Forty-five years ago this week, there was a march in Alabama to protest the need for civil rights reform. As this happened, President Johnson presented Congress with a bill that would eventually become the Voting Rights Act. 

That was ten years before I was born, but I don’t know a world without that reality. Now, I’m not going to tell you I believe civil rights ended the problems it sought to fix. That we don’t still have a lot more to do to make the bill that passed in August of 1965 a true success. But… the fact is I came into a world where that was the law for ten years.

I regret my knowledge of the civil rights movement isn’t as detailed as my memory of Henry VIII’s intrigues or early Hollywood. I should know more because I just take it for granted that the law was passed and all was right and good. But no. There was division and protests and marches and murder and a whole lot of name calling. And fear. Fear that constituting this change was going to upset the balance and destroy our nation. That giving someone an opportunity to vote was going to destroy the fabric of our glorious nation of America.

But you know what? We’re still here. And things got better not worse.

When I do read that history, I have to wonder what was in the minds and hearts of those who believed so entirely that creating civil rights was destructive? I can write in a paper or discuss in a class that it was fear. And I suppose that’s a lot of what it was. Fear of the unknown. Fear of losing something, even if that something wasn’t really worth holding onto. Fear of having a government tell you how to think and feel about someone else. 

I understand that. And I try to think at what point in my life have I allowed myself to shape my feelings by fear. When have I hated or dug my heels in the ground against something because I was scared or hurt? I understand… and I understand that when I felt those things, I always felt icky inside for doing something I knew wasn’t entirely right. So I don’t know how I could live in a world where it was okay to deny someone a chance to vote because of the color of their skin. Or to fight against that with fire hoses and dogs and burning crosses. 

But maybe… maybe I can’t think that way because I was born into this world after a group in this nation decided that they should change the attitude. Because we had a president willing to take a stand and direct his Congress to make a law where that cannot happen. Because there were many brave men and women who marched in Alabama to say that this is not the world in which we should live. 

Change is never easy. The unknown is always intimidating. But that doesn’t mean we should keep things as they are. That we shouldn’t celebrate when the earthquake comes and disturbs the complacency. Because ten years from now there will be a child born who will never know what the world is like without this new reality. A child who will look back and wonder why we ever thought it was conscionable to deny a person health care.