In a speech given five days before his 1968 assassination, Martin Luther King repeated words that that toward the end of his life had become a kind of refrain: the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Often blocks stand before us not of our own making and often they are unfair. What moves us forward is less the knowledge that we will see immediate resolution and more faith that at a time we cannot see, justice will prevail.
My thoughts have returned to King’s idea frequently not just as I think about the current political situation, but also events in my own life. A year ago at this time I stood on a precipice: a routine scan showed signs of something that looked vaguely malignant. After a March biopsy confirmed doctor suspicions, the injustice of it left me feeling outraged. The news felt as senseless and cruel as the job layoff that followed ten days later.
The scales would rebalance but only after a hard slog through six months of uncertainty. Answers to the conundrum of health complications and unemployment came only I shambled into a make-shift routine, picking up the financial pieces as I could and learning how to deal with brutal medical treatments as I went. Recovery surprised me when it came while friends told me to be grateful I had not lost everything to the disease. Though the losses still angered me, the moral arc had bent my way and the justice of a (new) normality had returned.
This all happened in the small place of my life and while externals still worked in ways that made sense. But as I regained my balance last autumn, the world around began a slow descent into chaos. A presidential candidate who loved justice lost an election the legitimacy of which I still question. Talk soon turned to what was next. In the darker corners of the internet and social media, speculation began on all the things Americans stood to lose.
From one apocalypse I had slid into another; and the internal warning system showed signs of re-awakening. Made sensitive by years of compounded trauma, it had started to go dormant once code red medical and financial stressors had begun to dissipate. Now it was flashing a code yellow PTSD warning. Stay vigilant. Trust no one and nothing. For a time, I stopped sleeping; now the insomnia comes and goes. I am in good company: many Americans now report waking up in the middle of the night and being unable to return to sleep. We are all aware, too aware.
Then the new year many dreaded began with fire. The Southern California coast between Pacific Palisades and Los Angeles burned like an omen from hell. It looks like a war zone, said a childhood friend who lost the only home he’d ever known. A mirror image of that brutality soon followed when on the other side of the country, new political officials replaced old ones then immediately set about denying funding to people and institutions, cutting jobs to others and threatening higher prices through unnecessary tariffs. The blitzkrieg madness of it all made a few weeks feel like a few years.
The irony of it all has not escaped me. Just as I was finding balance, an even greater unbalancing had taken place outside my door. Everything was in crisis; where was the justice in that? Yet as I write this, I am still among the more fortunate. Like the vast majority of Americans, I have no personal fortune to buffer me against internal and external shocks. For now, though, I have enough to keep moving forward and prepare for what may come. It’s a form of resistance, these things I do now: keeping apprised of the contagions—influenza, COVID, measles and bird flu—that surround us like a sickly sea; stocking up as though the next day may bring shortages or disaster or both; protecting personal information compromised by individuals with no interest in keeping the population safe. But all of this has taken its toll.
I’m tired these days. Very tired. Recovery—full recovery, and this just from my disease—can take a year or more. You also cannot expect to go through major medical crisis and the threat of losing everything and not experience fallout at some point. Add to that an external situation that favors no one except a morally bankrupt oligarchic class and the exhaustion only increases. MLK often spoke of weariness, too, though in context of never giving up the struggle. Which makes me wonder: did he ever consider that periods of rest could be as radical—and just—as taking action?
Ancient and indigenous cultures practiced restorative justice which focused on reconciliation between the perpetrator of a wrong and the one(s) wronged. There will never be remediation of this kind between those who currently govern and Americans; so as we await the moral arc to bend itself toward justice, perhaps we should interpret this practice literally by engaging in acts that restore us: in other words, by actively seeking the justice of rest where and when we can, even if we must fight for that time. Because now everything is about bleeding urgencies and never-ending demands from all directions.
And so I say no to external frenzy and yes to time out. I step away from all media to meditate. I take frequent walks on the neighborhood green and tend to my small garden. I bathe to the sounds of raindrops on my white noise machine. I take naps and I don’t apologize. Rest is one of the most radical acts anyone can engage in now. The justice we enact for ourselves will help us move the universal moral arc towards balance once again. Protestors often chant say no peace, no justice. To that I say know peace, know justice. Restoring balance to ourselves first is the new necessity for us all.