April 1968: Martin Luther King

When Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968,  I was a senior at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois.  I see myself getting the news in the Gizmo, the campus coffee shop, that night.  I was in some early part of the process of directing a play I'd written.  It had a large cast and involved multimedia, so there was a lot to think about.  I wanted to being thinking about it, to be in that creative cocoon and not naked to the daily onslaught of painful information and images, warping the present and endangering the future, including my imminent one.  I didn't want to think about the killing of the man who shaped nonviolent protest and the civil rights movement.

 I'd been among the thousands who heard him speak at the March on Washington in 1963, when I was still in high school.  As some of the articles that appeared this past week noted, things had changed amazingly in those few years, and I was aware of it at the time.  King had to defend his nonviolent tactics and his goals to more militant new leaders and organizations outflanking him within the world of black activism.  Their grievances and goals were larger, more culturally expansive, and some advocated violence.

At the same time, King had lost support within the Lyndon Johnson administration as well as among many white voters by coming out strongly against American involvement in the Vietnam War.  His new emphasis on economic justice for blacks rather than civil and political rights confused, irritated and alarmed many.

Fifty years later his "I have a dream" speech at the March on Washington is linked with his instant image.  (JFK's face flashes on the screen, a two word soundbite: "Ask Not," followed immediately by MLK "I have a dream today.")  The last speech of his life was in Memphis and referred back to the dream but in the language of the promised land, in which he uttered the eerie words "I may not get there with you."

He clearly did not mean simply that the fight for true equality would take more than his natural lifetime, although if he had, he would have been right. He would be 89 now, and despite a twice-elected black President, inequality and pernicious racism still exist--and black people are still dying, still being killed because of it.

He clearly was talking about the possibility of his early, perhaps imminent death. I recall my reaction the first time I saw a clip of that speech: that's a man who knows--or at least suspects--that he's going to be killed.

One of the 50th anniversary stories last week, by Tom Jackman in the Washington Post, stated that the King children and other family members do not believe that James Earl Ray alone killed Martin Luther King.  He also writes: Until her own death in 2006, Coretta Scott King, who endured the FBI’s campaign to discredit her husband, was open in her belief that a conspiracy led to the assassination."

I know that's what she suspected, but I also know she wasn't always open about it.  In 1976 I was the editor of Washington Newsworks, a weekly alternative newspaper in DC.  (In fact, our offices were in the Adams-Morgan area, parts of which still bore obvious signs of the rioting and burning that followed the King assassination in several cities.)  One of our reporters made contact with investigators who were presenting their evidence to a congressional subcommittee on the King assassination.  It outlined a conspiracy.

We were given an advance look at that report.  We were also told that Coretta King was so interested that she was in Washington to attend these hearings, but in secret. Not publishing this fact was a condition of our getting this exclusive.

I edited and arranged this material into a narrative and we made it our cover story. At the last minute before we went to press the investigator-contact got cold feet about publication. I suggested that if we were prevented from publishing the story, any agreement not to reveal Coretta King's presence in Washington would be nullified.

So he relented and we not only published, but several of us from Newsworks personally delivered a copy of that issue to every congressional office on Capitol Hill.  We may have caught a glimpse of a few Members but we were unable to make personal contact with any.

This stuff was toxic then and even fifty years later is considered out there.  But here's the thing: just because most conspiracy theories are crazy, doesn't mean they all are.  It used to be said that such conspiracies could never happen because the secret couldn't be kept, sooner or later someone would talk.  Well, lots of people have talked and none have been believed.  (Once again, just because there are a lot of crazy people who claim to know something, doesn't mean that some people don't really know something.)

Now of course it's all safely in the "no one will ever know the truth" zone, especially in our era when factual evidence has no special standing.   What we have learned (as Jackman's story outlines) is the antipathy and extra-legal surveillance of King by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, along with the violent antipathy of southern white extremists, who didn't need much encouragement to act.  King must have known something about this.  He may have seen danger to his life in an upcoming protest or he may have sensed something else, but clearly he foresaw the possibility of being killed.



In April 1968 I would have also read or seen the story of how Robert Kennedy spoke to a largely black audience in Indianapolis that same night, and was the one who broke the news to them of King's assassination.  His short heartfelt speech is credited with the fact that no rioting happened in that city that night.  A Washington Post story this week called it "one of the most compelling and overlooked speeches in U.S. political history."

I was not surprised by his speech. For me at that moment Robert Kennedy was the last beacon of hope.  He'd started his campaign for the presidential nomination.  By the time my spring classes and comprehensive exams were over, the primaries would be as well. If he got the nomination,  I looked forward to the possibility of somehow working in his presidential campaign, assuming I would be free to do so--which was, given the draft calls, a large assumption.

But that of course is another story.

The Time Machine.7: Evolution of Empathy

“A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasure of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination;"
P.B. Shelley

"The soul without imagination is what an observatory would be without a telescope."
Henry Ward Beecher

When the forest fire approaches, most of the Morlocks run off in all directions. The Traveller is safe. Or is he? He sees several coming at him, and he "struck furiously at them with my bar, in a frenzy of fear, as they approached me, killing one and crippling several more."

But then, even in this frenzy of defending against an apparent onslaught, he realizes they are not really attacking him any more. They are blind, at least in the presence of the fire's light, and they are simply blundering towards him in their fearful frenzy to escape the light and heat.

And then the Traveller stops. "But when I had watched the gestures of one of them groping under the hawthorn against the red sky, and heard their moans, I was assured of their absolute helplessness and misery in the glare, and I struck no more of them."

In the physical details of this sentence, and in the words "moans" and "misery," the Morlocks are "humanized" to a new extent. But the Traveller also concludes that they are helpless.  Killing them when they were attacking him, regardless of how good or bad it might feel, was justified and necessary self-defense. To kill them now, however good it feels or however angry he still is, would be murder.

John Huntington notes this sentence, this "I struck no more of them" and a later passage in which the Traveller is mourning the death of Weena and considers revenge ("a massacre of the helpless abominations") but "contains" himself, as key examples of how the Traveller's humanity is different from these species: he can exert self-control.

"It is his ability—a distinctly human ability—to bridge distinctions, to recognize an area of identity within a difference, that sets him apart,” Huntington observes. “The Time Traveller is able to assert an ethical view in the face of the evolutionary competition that rules the future."

The ethical view, beginning with an insight of empathy, that is the human difference. This was the position of Wells' teacher, T.H. Huxley, going back some 30 years but expressed most eloquently in his lecture “Evolution and Ethics,” his final and summary statement which was delivered and published while Wells was writing The Time Machine.

Huxley concedes that natural selection is mostly a brutal process, and that as animal life, the human species has been subject to it. But at this point in its evolution, humanity has developed both consciousness and civilization, which will be the basis of its particular "artificial" evolution.

Huxley didn't believe that evolution meant progress or guaranteed human triumph. Like other species, humanity would naturally peak and then decline, perhaps becoming extinct. But before the earth dies or some outside force suddenly overtakes or wipes out the human species, humanity can exercise a great deal of control over its fate. That will require some counter-force to natural decay, or new skills that will keep humanity going.

Technology is the obvious example of a new skill, except that technology without conscience and conscious control is the best candidate to be the instrument of humanity’s self-destruction.

Huxley believed that the counter-force would be human ethics. Humanity could change the rules of evolution by the ethical decisions to work for the betterment of all:

"The practice of that which is ethically best—what we call goodness or virtue," he wrote, "involves a course of conduct which in all respects, is opposed to that which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for existence. In place of ruthless self-assertion it demands self-restraint; in place of thrusting aside, or treading down, all competitors, it requires that the individual shall not merely respect, but shall help his fellows; its influence is directed, not so much to the survival of the fittest, as to the fitting of as many as possible to survive. It repudiates the gladiatorial theory of existence."

Both Huxley and Wells recognized the importance of cooperation and altruism in biological evolution. Huxley used examples of bees and ants, and Wells wrote in an 1892 essay (“Ancient Experiments in Co-Operation”) that the idea that competition alone causes changes in biological evolution is “a horrible conception, as false as it is evil.”

Some (including G.B. Shaw) would note that in certain circumstances, human self-restraint does enhance survival, and that human reason and ethics add to the fitness of individuals and the species, so they are actually features of human evolution, though perhaps not yet in a Darwinian timeframe. Intelligence, self-knowledge and ethical behavior are successful adaptations for the species.

Nevertheless, even without these assertions, ethics were important to Huxley because they define the human. That’s why it is important that humanity fosters “the survival of the ethically fittest.”

The ethics themselves define the human, but so does the intelligence and creativity to formulate them, the expression of freedom and the act of will to choose them.

So the meat-eating Time Traveller who exults as he strikes and kills, controls the expression of these responses and feelings, by using his ethical conscience. In this case, the situation doesn't require a lot of soul-searching and analysis, as it might in others. Not killing the helpless is recognizably an aspect of English "fair play," and the Traveller's quick decision, which he seems to feel will be obvious to the upper middle class Englishmen listening to his story, suggests that civilization can help to make ethical restraint nearly as reflexive as fight or flight.

Still, the pattern of thought is fairly sophisticated. He realizes that the violent emotion he is feeling towards the Morlocks is not necessarily the same emotion the Morlocks are feeling. He realizes that because he finds the Morlocks loathsome, hateful and threatening at that moment, they don't find him so—if only because they can't see him, and have other things on their minds. They are not a danger to him just because they are ugly and strange. They endanger him only when they attack him.

His decision not to wreak revenge later also seems dependent on this idea of the Morlocks as "helpless," though very soon they prove not to be completely so. Still, there are plenty of real cases, and many stories and feature films, in which violent revenge (or "payback") is a reflex that does not take the current helplessness of the original perpetrator into account at all.

In The Time Machine, Wells subtly undermines the use of science to justify selfishness and conflict. By dramatizing the way evolution works—not as inevitable progress, or progress based on Social Darwinist or racist principles—he shows that left to its own process, natural selection does not necessarily favor the survival of humanity as a conscious, intelligent species.

The science that led up to Darwin had a close relationship to the industrial era. The Darwinian process of natural selection itself, extended as a general rule, sees nature as a kind of machine.

But in Wells’ story humanity achieved the perfection of a machine by dividing, and ending itself. “I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been,” the Traveller thought. “It had committed suicide.”

At first a divided society seemed to work out for everyone, he speculated, in harmony with its environment until it became “a perfect mechanism.” By becoming parts of this machine, the elite and the servile became their roles, their unchanging functions. Humanity created its perfection by apparently following the Social Darwinist and possibly racist lines, and separating the species.

It worked for awhile, the Traveller speculates. But they "had lacked one thing even for mechanical perfection—absolute permanency." The environment changed, and the two halves of humanity no longer had the intellectual versatility to cope, other than in the awful way the Morlocks and Eloi did. "There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change," the Traveller says.

That versatility is energized in part by humanity's struggle to persist in its environment, but also by the internal energy of differences within humanity that challenges the mind, quickens the heart and deepens the soul.

Intelligence in these terms includes imagination and empathy, which is the imaginative act of understanding the emotions of another—or the Other.
Taking into account the information the Traveller acquired through empathy helped guide his actions. It’s a very human thing to do.

“Empathy” was not yet a known word in English when The Time Machine was written—its first instance is early twentieth century, although it was based on a German word coined a half century earlier. It was first applied to understanding the emotion in works of art, or the aesthetic appreciation of people.

Another feature of the human response that the Traveller applies to this future world is the aesthetic response itself--the appreciation of beauty. 

For example, as he rests among the Eloi after his battle with the Morlocks, he reflects on the beauty of the sunny morning, and on the beauty of the Eloi as they again laugh and play by the river.

The scene may remind us of others in which the Traveller sits and observes the beauty around him. Beauty was the first virtue of this future that he saw, and now it seems to be the last.

It was on the hill as he gazed at the stars, thinking with some awe about the sweep of cosmic time, that he realized what the Eloi's relationship to the Morlocks was. It was then he looked at "little Weena sleeping beside me, her face white and starlike under the stars." With this Wells makes an instant connection between the beauty of the cosmos and the beauty of this frail child-like creature.

Some critics and readers have found the presence of Weena to be cloying and embarrassing, if not faintly perverse. But the childlike quality of the Eloi is metaphorically apt, as well as producing a certain tug of sentiment. Children as a rule are beautiful. It is not only a physical attribute but resides in their affection, trust, curiosity and delight in the world. It is in their eyes.

Otherwise weak and helpless, it is their beauty and the effect it has on adults that makes it their chief survival mechanism. This beauty is common to children of all ethnicities, genders, classes.

As they grow a little older, children reach out to other children, regardless of any distinctions. They have to be taught to judge by skin color. Children naturally get angry and act aggressively, but generally they must be taught to hate.

While ugliness alone is not enough to justify violence, beauty alone is worth preserving. The Time Traveller's impulse to take the beautiful child back with him is an impulse to honor the only living form of value he finds in the future. And though he cannot take Weena, he accidentally takes with him two white flowers that she had placed in his pocket.

It is these flowers that the narrator—the witness to the Traveller's tale—holds onto, "to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man."

But before the Traveller can return home, he must retrieve his time machine. There is one more battle to fight, and a series of brief but memorable glimpses into the farthest future.

To be continued...For prior posts in this series, click on the "Soul of the Future" label below.

Past: Easter Parade

Easter was a pretty big deal where and when I grew up.  Because I went to Catholic schools, there was an even bigger buildup to it than to Christmas.  It started with ashes on Ash Wednesday and that began Lent.  We all had to decide what we would give up for Lent, in addition to the stuff everybody was supposed to give up.  Forty days of it, pal.  Endless.

Then finally Holy Week:  Holy Thursday (the Last Supper, the betrayal), Good Friday (the events of the Stations of the Cross, ending with the Crucifixion), Holy Saturday (Christ in his tomb), Easter (Christ's resurrection from the dead.)  Holy week was Christian and not just Catholic (and downtown was dotted with impressive churches of several denominations), so a lot of stores in town would be closed from noon to three p.m. on Friday, commemorating the hours on the cross. All the stores would of course be closed on Easter Sunday.  Especially since they were closed every Sunday.

The same confusing combinations of secular, folk and religious traditions as Christmas were more extreme at Easter, the feast of blood, death and chocolate.  A bloody scourging, carrying the cross, nailed to it, crucified, dead in the tomb, then gone.  Hearing about all this in great detail in school was usually followed by attending the appropriate ceremony in church.  There was usually a church pretty handy to the school.

So after being assaulted with all this, it was home to decorate eggs, smell the baking, maybe a taste or two of batter or icing. I guess the egg decorating was on Saturday. My only clear memory of this was at my grandmother's, on her white tablecloth in the dining room (same as in the photo above.)The mysteries of food coloring, dipping eggs in hot water, watching them turn yellow or blue and fishing them out when they were your desired shade.  I liked the coloring.  Any decorating beyond that wasn't my style.  I was a minimalist.  And I didn't eat the eggs.  Yucky.

Dressing up for Easter Sunday Mass, a bigger deal for my sisters, but if my mother felt I needed a new shirt or suit or something, I usually got it for Easter.  Maybe a new clip-on bow tie!  I found one photo of my sister Kathy and I in our Easter best, but we were obviously in such a foul mood glowering at the camera that I shouldn't post it.  I'm wearing a snazzy hat, too.

Easter morning there would be our Easter baskets. Chocolate eggs and chocolate bunnies (some were hollow, which was disappointing, but the solid chocolate ones you could gnaw on for hours), marshmallow peeps, jelly beans.

And the Easter Parade.  Which always confused me because there wasn't one.  Just people crowding out of church like every Sunday. But we had to dress up for one anyway.

My grandmother gave us some live Easter chicks (or "peeps") a few times.  They generally didn't make it to chickenhood, though one did.  He hung around for quite a long time, pecking away in the yard. His name was Elmer.

Easter dinner would pretty invariably be at my grandmother's.  It would be the usual feast--the wedding-style soup, pasta dish, meat course (usually roast chicken--sorry, Elmer), salad, and a dozen side dishes.  And my grandmother would distribute the unique Easter pastries she made for us.  They were thick cookie objects shaped like dolls for the girls and horses with a kind of handle at the top for the boys, covered in icing and sprinkles.  This was the only day of the year that these appeared.

This photo above is from fairly late in the game, about 1964. (Click on it to see it without the right edge cut off.)  I'm in the back row, holding my horse.  I'm about to go off to college in a few months.  Next to me, holding one of her children (Nancy) is Rose Severini, my aunt.  Next to her on the right is my grandfather, Ignazio Severini.  This photo doesn't scan very well for some reason, so it's probably hard to make things out.  (Also the shadows of my head and Aunt Rosie's head have merged with our hair.) But the horse my grandfather is holding is covered with chocolate icing--his favorite--so it's more visible.

The front row is my cousin Susan Severini, my sister Debbie, Tom Severini, my grandmother Giaconda with a baby, which must be Steve Severini, and Shirley Severini.

It's not clear in this photo but on the left side of the table is a cake shaped and decorated like a lamb, its white frosting laden with coconut flakes.  Another of my grandmother's specialties, only at Easter.  I'm not sure what that is in the center.  High over our heads is a portrait of a family member from Italy, but I don't recall who.

The lamb is a Christ symbol. (There were lots of fish side dishes at dinner, another Christ symbol.) The eggs, bunnies and chicks however belong to the original feasting day that Easter is superimposed on, celebrating spring and the generating of new life.  There is also a tradition that people went eggless for Lent, and children were presented with a basket of decorated eggs at Easter to celebrate Lent's end.

Horses and dolls, I have no idea, but safe to say, Italian.  Chocolate is apparently a modern American addition, due to availability and the eager support of chocolate manufacturers, as well as the general rule that any excuse is a good excuse for chocolate.

But I am reminded that despite this melange of "traditions", there were boundaries between them, and lines you didn't cross.  Like the chocolate crucifix I saw on sale a few Easters ago.  That would have been considered sacrilegious.