We’d like to draw your attention to an excellent post by Neeraj Mehta over on Sojourners’ God’s Politics blog, calling us to the ideal of Dr. King in being “maladjusted to injustice”:
When a country brutalized by poverty like Haiti is hit by a natural disaster, we should be angry. When a teenager walking down the street in the middle of the day is shot dead, we should be angry. No matter where we live, no matter how comfortable our lives are, no matter how rich or poor we are, these realities should shake us, should affect us, should push us to live and strive for something different. [. . .]
In a lot of ways I think we’ve become brainwashed. Brainwashed into thinking that this is it. Brainwashed into believing we’re stuck with what we’ve got. This is the way the world is. Work hard, follow orders, stay in line, and you’ll get what you deserve, we’re told. But is that really it? Is this the road we want to be on? Is this really the best it is going to get?
In difficult times like these – times that are all the more difficult for progressives, as we see the Democrats we elected choosing to capitulate to the robber barons of the health insurance industry and Wall Street, and their bought and paid-for legislators in the Republican Party – it’s important to keep being maladjusted, to keep being angry.
And it’s important to keep imagining a better world, and keep that vision before us – to never forget that the world as it is isn’t a foregone conclusion or an inevitability, that change is still possible, and that the justice of God and the mercy of Christ Jesus are on our side.
As Dr. King writes, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Let us never be content with the injustices of the world as it is, let us never resign ourselves to platitudes like “the poor will always be with us” as if it’s a valid reason for inaction. Let us continue the good fight.
