Back in the 70, while I was in college, a monumental election took place. Well, not really. It was merely Carter vs Ford. I admit, I liked Carter. He seemed different. He was not the standard political type. He was an engineer. He promised to do things different: He was a moral man and his administration was going to reflect just that. In all honesty, it did. Carter deserves his reputation as a moral, honest man.
He made mistakes. Every president does. He had high obstacles. Every president does. He had challenges. Ever president does. He was eventually defeated by Reagan. The reason, to me at least, was that, like a good engineer, Carter wanted to discover and define the problems that faced him so that a solution could be articulated and implemented. He did this in public. That was his mistake. He was defeated by a man who only spoke of his dreams and visions for America, not of her problems and he refused to be sidetracked into pathology. So while Cater wanted to talk about the gravity of the challenge, Reagan wanted to talk about the glory of the victory over the challenge.
Carter went away quietly in 1981. He reemerged as a humanitarian. A quiet champion of the poor at home and abroad. He did it not in word but in word and deed by his work building houses for the poor.
Carter is getting old and age, and the information age with its need for new fodder to rip apart, devour, and spit out, has brought a different Carter. His last book on Israel has brought him much scorn. If only he had kept quiet. Maybe all of us are in danger of becoming caricatures of ourselves if we are left to talk long enough. It certainly seems to be true for pastors who forget to retire and actually sit down.
Our nations heros often died young. John Kennedy comes to mind. How would his image have fared had he lived on and had an extra 30 years to make a nuisance of himself? We will not ever know. His image was and is faithfully kept clean and without blemish by old friends and admirers and a horde of people who stand to profit from it politically.
I wonder about Martin Luther King in this respect as well. He is rightly beloved because he seems to have understood that one could not oppose another human being by making that person less than human and less worthy of dignity and respect than oneself. As much as he knew the pathology of the society, of which he lamented in his personal letters from prison, he rose to speak of visions of a redeemed future on the horizon. Would he have kept that balance had he not been killed? His image and legacy, like JFK's, is carefully maintained and preserved and the question I pose has really no answer.
Many years have past since the 60's. Thanks to kabillion news or commentary channels on cable, the fine art of pathology is flourishing. Not only is G.W. Bush's presidency still being exegeted but so is Clinton's and Reagan's. We live in a large bowl where everyone is screaming about the wrong and outrageous that they see. Would MLK have escaped? Would Reagan, had Alzheimer's not taken his brain, have escaped? Both of their followers have gotten caught inextricably in this maze of screaming about wrong and outrage. Today, sitting down and lamenting the lot of your class, race, profession, geographical enclave, political persuasion, religion, or sexual persuasion are almost mandatory. There is no vision right now, anywhere. There is only tallies of wrongs and harsh reparationist or retributionist remedies, all claiming the right of the victim to define right and wrong as well as the right to define the proper corrective measure. But these corrective measures all lack an important thing: a vision of a redeemed future.
So today we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.-- good for us. Will we today speak of wrongs and reparations and fixes or will we speak of the visions and dreams that Acts 2 promised the people of God? Without them, no right will ever be seen as right and no solution to a wrong will ever move us closer to a future that is any more righteous than the present, it would be merely "different."
The people of God must quit complaining and begin to dream again.