“The arc of the moral Universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Friday night I was indulging in one of the few sinful pleasures still available to a senior citizen like me. And it wasn't just the frozen yogurt with shredded All-Bran, but the TV show playing on my Christmas-new wide screen TV while I was enjoying the late night snack: Bill Mahr's Real Time on HBO. Mahr is unapologetically sacrilegious and politically incorrect, a passionate, libertarian comedian with a penchant for off-color humor, but he is quite often spot on in his analysis of the contemporary American scene. I don't always agree with him or approve of his linguistic repertoire, but Mahr and his panelists frequently go where the more timid CNN and mainstream media fear to tread.
Last week one of their main topics was gun control, and the panel more or less agreed that the possibility for actual change in American values about guns and violence was very slim. Then one of Mahr's panelists--Martin Short, another comic--made a startling observation. He noted that twenty years ago, they would have been sitting around that table smoking cigarettes while they talked, but now the whole building is smoke-free. He suggested this evolutionary shift in health consciousness was cause for the advocates of rational control to take heart.
Martin Short's remark suddenly brought to mind the words of an other Martin, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. himself a victim of gun violence after a life of tireless advocacy for peace and non-violence. In a profoundly metaphysical evaluation about the forces at work behind the scenes in life, King said: “The arc of the moral Universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Sometimes, change happens so gradually that you wake up one day and say, "Oh, yeah. I remember when we did that. Way back there in the 20th century."
Most meaningful change takes time. Seasons drift incrementally onward. Today a little cooler... next month winter.... then warming, new life, and summer again. Human consciousness is impatient. If I have a cold that lasts more than a few days, I start wondering if I will ever stop coughing. If I cannot master a new task quickly, I catch myself muttering, "I'll never get this right!" But I do get better; I do master the task. (My Smart Phone will not make me feel stupid forever, just for awhile.)
The key to the equation is to find a common denominator--faith in the arc of learning, the potential for slow but ineluctable change. We started in the seas; we shall sail the stars. But not today. Cool winds must play across our landscape before the warming breath of Spring. Patience. Swords will melt into ploughshares. Nation shall not take up arms against nation. The moral arc bends toward justice, and we ride its rainbow with confidence and faith.
