Just watched an excellent BBC4 documentary about Martin Luther King. What a leader he was. But what got to me the most, unsurprisingly, were the man’s opponents; the people shouting at the niggers to go home, the police swaggering with their nightsticks as their colleagues beat a man to the ground, the New York Times saying the point has been made so stop marching, Senator Robert Byrd being just as oily and broken as his reputation indicated he was.
History has passed judgement on all these people, and it was not kind.
I felt revulsion. They believed the rightness of their cause with such passion, and they were so horribly and unarguably wrong. It is a failing in us as humans, that we so often exalt the most noxious and the basest parts of our natures.
(This is something which I need to remind myself – that some of the people I disagree with are not simply of a different opinion, but of an opinion to which the only response is condemnation. There are still such people in this world, and their voices are prominent. One of them leads the most powerful nation on earth, for a start.)
A question that arises from the above: of what value is belief when it can lead us so catastrophically astray?