Forbes Keys Off MLK Day Celebration

By G. Emily Ghods-Eshafani | Friday, January 20, 2006

Our generation, arguably more than any other, has been pushed and pulled, torn and mended, shaped and affected by the white noise that fills the gap between religion and politics. From traditional family values, to classical virtues, from intelligent design to abortion, from fertility practices to stem cell research, the national and local consciousness pivots atop the modern psychosis that allows that there actually is a constitutional “separation of church and state.”

To this effect, Dartmouth College honored one of the great religious figures of our time, on the occasion of his birthday: a memorial for Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. At such a commemoratory as this, the College offers the students and faculty the following program:

Thesis : Religion, Antithesis : Politics, Synthesis : Martin Luther King, Jr.

So, happy birthday Reverend King.

King, as a minister and civil rights activist, lived his short life with his head held high in the raucous waters that rage between the shores of heaven and hell-on-earth, redemption and justice, brotherhood and segregation, violence and non-violence. Invoking the above theme, this year’s keynote speaker, the Reverend James A. Forbes of New York City’s Upper West Side Riverside church, arrived on campus for something of a revival: to quicken the spirit of non-violent action, for which King devoted his life.

Rev. Forbes’ speech was preceded by the College’s own Professor Susannah Heschel and President James Wright. Professor Heschel, given time, professed her distaste for injustice; President Wright, appropriately, favors diversity; Reverend Forbes’ allegorical oratory favors all things divine in Heaven and in Mankind.

First up and filled with good intentions, Professor Heschel, as was her wont, boldly transgressed the barrier between the space wherein the practical and considerate bob heads with the impossible and the radical. Speaking in tones approaching that of the royal ‘we,’ Professor Heschel maintains that ‘we’—her collegiate audience—occupy unique positions of power and privilege, and are by force of virtue and ‘social justice’ compelled to extend our compassion to echo the muffled voices of those without the power and position that ‘we’ have been granted (presumably by God, or if not, a regressive tax policy). Rev Forbes, speaking from a place transcendent and removed from the president and the professor, mellifluously restates such sentiment later in the night when he says, “you can’t get to heaven without a letter of reference from the poor.”

Getting straight to the tip of her rather blunt point, Professor Heschel proceeded to trip over her own good intentions when she universally described these very same ‘weak individuals’ who merit our echoes, as human beings unjustly caged by the “American way of enslaving the black people and the poor”—an elliptical and, no doubt, artistic reference to prisons and their commonwealth.

Reflecting on Biblical images of Cain, who was granted divine protection rather than temporal punishment for his murderous sin of fratricide, and Job, who, we are to understand, considered hell a more promising domicile than prison, Professor Heschel’s daft solution to crime is to not punish the criminal, but instead, as benefits the do-gooder, shower the malefactors with mercy—and one might guess, some state of the art athletic facilities.

To the impassioned professor, God is always just and merciful, so we should be too (at a time like this, mentioning Noah’s flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, and the drubbing of the Canaanites—amongst other acts of divine ‘mercy’—would likely have been considered bad form, unsuitable to the lovey-dovey God that showers villains and criminals with heavenly mercy and weight lifting gear). Not to contest her point but rather the implication that punishment and prison should be abolished, a reasonable person might wonder why the two are mutually exclusive; when a good mother punishes a bad child, she does it, presumably, to guide the wayward child along the right path.

Following Professor Heschel, President Wright was next to take the stage. The President’s general theme was the nexus between diversity and change. To President Wright, we must transcend our daily selves by embracing the “change [that is a] necessity to embracing progress.” It should of course be clear to all (excluding those ne’er-do-wells disposed to a life of crime and debauchery) that we should only embrace good change; after all, the good intentioned Reverend King and Chairman Mao both advocated embracing ‘progressive’ changes, but only one of them rooted such changes in the religious traditions of those they hoped to change; Che Guevara got two major motion pictures and one hell of a tee-shirt concession out of his commitment to ‘progressive’ change.

Beyond the attention he gives to diversity and change, etc. etc., President Wright does not give the audience too much to work with. That is, his stance is socially and culturally neither good nor bad. Vague, and all at once inoffensive and phlegmatic, President Wright leaves the audience with not a few loveable bromides: “Dartmouth’s diversity mirrors the richness of our society;” “Responsibility comes because we embrace it, it does not come otherwise;” “what affects any of us affects all of us.” Let’s just get it out, at Dartmouth College the bell tolls for thee, jerk-off!

Following an interlude reasonably long enough for the audience to reflect on, or nod off, the collective wisdom of its first two speakers, Gordon Wood ’06, President of the Afro-American Society, introduced Rev. Forbes. Breath to breath, Reverend Forbes schooled Wright and Heschel in the art of sincere oratory; he was subtle, they were obtuse; he was charming, they were prosaic; he was humble, they were magniloquent. Forbes certainly lived up to his reputation as an outstanding man of God, quite a speaker—perhaps, because he understood his audience. Or more generally, he understood people , able to easily moveothers because he easily moved himself.

To Rev. Forbes, just as all individuals partake of a transcendent humanity where, in the spirit of Christ, loving your neighbor as yourself is akin to loving your brother as you love yourself, King’s dream partakes of a spirit immortal and therefore transcended his own time and place, making his message and spirit relevant not only to 1960s America, but to people around the world, even on to this day.

Though alchemically mixing the profane with the sacred, to the detriment of the latter, Rev. Forbes stood the ground of Rev. King by employing the most enduring and edifying forms of moral philosophy and righteous theology: story telling.

Having the children in the audience stand, Rev. Forbes began his first story; a Dutch legend about a young boy who is on his way to school, who, when he passes a dyke, notices a small leak. The boy is morally torn between ignoring the hole and getting on with his business, or stopping to plug his finger into the hole. Knowing that he will be in trouble if he is, unaccountably, late for school, the plucky young lad pokes his finger into the hole to cork the leak. When a passer-by notices the proud and pitiable boy, he summons more help until other stronger, more powerful men come with the wherewithal to bind the leak.

The second story is immortalized in Rev. Forbes’ own childhood. One morning when he was a young boy, his mother saw him off to school, only to see him return half an hour later. When she asked him why he came back, the young Forbes responded with the clarity and honesty common to a precocious child. “Mama, I was walking and went to turn the corner to get to school when I saw a big dog barking at me. So, I walked back to the next corner around the block, and I saw another big dog. There are dogs around every corner I turn!”

Building off of these two stories, Rev. Forbes makes the point that we need the courage of the Dutch boy to turn the corner where injustice doggedly dwells. Rev. Forbes alliterates the audience to “get mad with mediocrity” and indecision. Decide that you want to be part of something that makes you feel good at the end of the day; in Hemingway’s words, “what is moral is what you feel good after,” to be clear, it is what makes your soul feel good after.

When you find something that is threatening the universal dream, shared by Rev. King, for love and justice, find the courage to do something. In the Reverend’s pithy phrase, “do something today; do more tomorrow.” Can I get a hallelujah!? Going old-school, the Reverend reminds his audience that no man is an island, “make a declaration of interdependence.” Everything I do affects everything you do because we are both “involved in mankind,” to use Donne’s words. When we see someone suffering, it is our duty to help that person because our existence emanates from one common source.

Rev. Forbes ends the celebration of King’s birth by giving us a glimpse into that common source; God, or Ultimate Reality, or Truth, depending on your perspective.

During the question-and-answer session following the speech, one student lamented his friends’ apathy concerning politics. It shocks him that his friends aren’t interested in discussing tax policy while hanging out. Looking for guidance, he asks Forbes, “what can we do and say to cause people to care?”

Reverend Forbes, being no fool, wisely tells the student to avoid laying politics on his friends so heavy and thick; rather than demand political rigmarole from them, tell the Truth, like mamma said, and tell it with a capital (divine) T. Reverend Forbes humbly and reasonably grants that by listening to his own friends, he “can usually gain a perspective that’s enriching for [his] own understanding,” while still allowing that we can spend “years debating whether [the truth] is this or that, and realize [once we get to heaven] that it was possibly some third other .”

We can see the reason that politics and religion seem so earnestly at odds in the distinctions between Rev. Forbes and Prof. Heschel. Forbes, in his appeal to a higher authority, grants that he does not know all the answers; Professor Heschel, more temporal in spirit, affects that she does. Forbes trusts the designs of God, Heschel those of human ingenuity.

This is the reason that years from now, the audience will remember Forbes’ tear-jerking song, “when your song of life has ended and the curtains rise no more, I’ll [God] be with you until the end of time,” and we’ll strain to recall Professor Heschel’s tuneful rejoinder, “marching in Selma was the most significant thing a person could do.” Certainly, it would have surpassed the limitations of a dogmatic speaking assignment.

Forbes Keys Off MLK Day Celebration

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