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Polarization is the great evil, the great scourge of our times. All our great authorities tell us so.
All our great authorities are wrong.
Polarization is not a great evil, so long as great evil lives in our land. This was a primary message of one of Martin Luther King's most famous writings, his "Letter from Birmingham Jail" [PDF].
Indeed, King himself was one of the most polarizing figures of American history, and his entire career consisted of polarizing public opinion, breaking down apathy and comfortable indifference in the face of great evils-racism, poverty and war. Those evils are still with us today, though in differing guises and proportions, and yet we not only hear repeated calls for unity, for rejecting polarization, we see King himself obscenely misrepresented as a harmless, Santa Claus-like figure of fuzzy-headed unity. It is hard to conceive of a greater insult to his memory.
King's letter is one of the most remarkable pieces of literature in history. It is, in its essence, the testament of an entire movement, a struggle for justice by an oppressed people within the world's most powerful empire. It stands in significance next to the words of Moses, whose example was one of enduring sources of strength in that struggle.
The letter from eight white clergymen he was responding to is in no wise comparable. Yet, it is worth noting in detail, because it so faithfully represents what has once again come to be the conventional wisdom of our age. We need to see ourselves clearly in the mirror of their words, to bring home forcefully that when King was writing from Birmingham Jail, we were not their with him, however much we might like to imagine that. No. We were the ones he was writing to.
That is our shame and our situation today.
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