Sometimes I Feel Discouraged

The Civil Rights Memorial, Montgomery, AL. Photo: Wikipedia.

This is the time to listen to some of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s recorded speeches, not only because it was his birthday, coinciding so weirdly and bitterly with Mr. T’s inauguration, but because discouragement is a problem, at some time, for all of us.

He spoke of discouragement in Montgomery, Alabama, after being awakened by an after-midnight phone call. An unnamed man was threatening to murder Reverend King, his wife and just-born daughter if they hadn’t left town in three days. “Sometimes I feel discouraged,” he mused.

It was not the first death threat he’d received in the days of his leadership of the Civil Rights Movement; a bundle of dynamite sticks had been left at his front door, and there had been many other calls threatening a man who moved around the south unarmed and with no bodyguard other than a few devoted friends. He would be murdered nine years later, at the age of 39.

But this phone call disturbed him deeply. He was not able to get back to sleep and went for a cup of coffee in the hope that it would soothe him. Yet he didn’t for a moment consider abandoning his ministry and the Kings would not be leaving Montgomery in three days.

It is perhaps not useful to talk about the role faith played in Rev. King’s life because faith, however defined, has almost no role to play in contemporary U.S. society. So I’m turning instead to a quote from Václav Havel, from The Power of the Powerless:

Hope is a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul… It transcends the world that is immediately experienced… It’s an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.”

Waking from the sleep of disillusion and cynicism, I see hope in the little birds pecking at my feeder—how quickly they discover that I’ve refilled it!—and here in Santa Fe, I see hope in the annual gathering of the state legislature in the Roundhouse a few blocks from where I live. For the first time in the state’s history, the lower chamber of the legislature is majority female (this will happen in the Senate by and by) and this big sparsely populated state is the only solidly Democratic state in the entire South West. I love to see that square of blue.

This happened because a small percentage of our population—it only takes a thousand people working together to bring about change—labored over the years to create an informed majority.

I am not part of that group. Even today when the Roundhouse opens with an acclamation for King Day, I will not be there. My contribution is oblique, as all writers’ is. But I take some comfort from Sunday’s New Testament reading which reassures that each of us has a gift. Mine is for words, written and spoken.

There are other women who are or have been powerfully and successfully engaged. I think of Deb Haaland, the first Native American Secretary of the Interior under President Biden, born near here in Laguna Pueblo. “I’m a pueblo woman,” she says, and in her four years she has brought significant protection from oil and gas drilling to sacred sites here, such as Chaco Canyon, increased federal funding for Native American initiatives, and begun what will be a decades-long investigation into the buried horrors of the boarding schools established under the auspices of the Federal government and of various religious groups. These boarding schools conspired to kidnap Native children and force them to cut their hair, learn English, and suffer abuse that led to at least three thousand dead children buried in unmarked graves. Her work inspired President Biden to issue an apology for “this sin upon our soul.” Secretary Haaland has done work for all of us that can’t be undone.

We cannot afford to be discouraged for long. Above all, we cannot afford to be afraid. Fear means giving over our power to what we fear. Our power lies in that grain of hope, sustained through affliction—small as one of the sunflower seeds the birds are pecking outside my window. It endures.

In Politics, New Mexico Martin Luther King Jr. Native American Boarding Schools