Every time the Mayor says that he supports paid sick leave, but it just isn’t the right time, I cringe. I wonder if he realizes the impact that using those words has on people. I keep thinking of the quote about how the right time to do the right thing is always now, but I couldn’t remember the exact words. So tonight, I googled “the right time” and found one of the quotes. Dr. Martin Luther King said, “The time is always right to do what is right.”
So I pulled out a few books I have upstairs to find some more of his words and I re-read the Letter from Birmingham Jail . . . the letter to his fellow clergyman starts about by his explanation that he wants to defend the claims that his arrest was “unwise and untimely”. I found the following passages that seem to apply to the situation here in Madison and throughout the United States for those people who do not have the right to stay home with a sick child or to be hospitalized, without the fear of losing their job or their housing because they cannot pay their rent. I’ll let Dr. Martin Luther King’s words, from another place and time, (while not directly the same situation, still applicable to today’s struggle for racial and economic justice) speak for themselves. And I sure hope that the Mayor’s office will think about Dr. Martin Luther King’s words next time they use phrases like: “He continues to feel this is not the time to be doing this.”
We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!”. It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”
I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: “All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth.” Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time; from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.
