Routine is revolutionary

In 1955, in Montgomery, Ala., the good Dr. King told his followers, “If we are arrested every day, if we are exploited every day, if we are trampled over every day, don't ever let anyone pull you so low as to hate them. We must use the weapon of love. We must have compassion and understanding for those who hate us. We must realize so many people are taught to hate us that are not totally responsible for their hate. But we stand in life at midnight, we are always on the threshold of a new dawn.”

The words sound good, high and noble. But boy, as you can imagine, they are not easy to apply. Imagine, for example, trying to not hate a redneck cop who is beating on your friends with his very hateful nightstick or mowing them down with a hateful high-powered fire hose. The path of non-violence can be extreme and difficult, to say the least. When it comes time to “peace up,” many have found, it's damned tough to hold that line.

And yet, much has changed in the last 50 years. Mostly for the better. I hope you can dig this memo from the Department of Sunshine, Lollipops, and Rainbows, Macrocosmic Division, because it just happens to be true.

It hit me while watching the Meaningless Bowl, held this year in Kudzu Heights, Ala. The camera was panning the crowd, looking for pretty girls, but what it was showing while it searched was a scene of complete integration. It's a scene we now take for granted, a scene that seems utterly unremarkable, which makes it fantastically cool. Shown on my screen was a thoroughly integrated crowd of black and white people, all sitting together, watching the game, doing what fans do. The fact that the numbers were about even, 50-50, black and white, spoke wordlessly and convincingly of how things have indeed gotten better. I have memories as a kid of the front page news that, OMG, a black man was actually allowed into the University of Mississippi. He could only do so with the help of federal agents. Now, thousands of blacks and whites attend classes together at the Universities of Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and Georgia, and it's a ho-hum yawner all the way. No biggie. Martin would approve.

Sure, there are plenty of racial problems hanging around, and some new ones, too. But don't let anyone tell you that we haven't made huge strides in the simple, decent act of getting along and tolerating one another. We have. It took decades to get there, it's true. But somewhere along the way, slowly and grudgingly, real, organic, accepted integration became the norm, to the point where now, the scenes I witnessed at the Meaningless Bowl don't even register. They're totally ordinary. We no longer even think about them. Which was, MLK would say, always the goal.