Fair enough… And thanks. In this world, we all need luck.
I have been dwelling on something Malcolm X once said. He was at the Oxford Union debates, this was in… 64, I think, so this was post-Hajj. The debating point was on the use of violence and the use of political violence, though the point he makes at the end is not necessarily about that. At the end of it, he said (in contrast to his earlier stance on race relations when he was the spokesman for the nation of islam) “And I, for one, will join in with anyone, I don’t care what color you are, as long as you want to change this miserable condition that exists on this earth.” I think this is right on the money, not just on race, but on the creation and maintenance of a just society for all. I think we are all far too quick to jump on people’s cases and not hear what they are saying. When we do that, we have this tendency to dismiss people who might otherwise be allies in the struggle for a more just world. Ta-Nehisi Coates said recently on his blog that he is an atheist and no longer believes that the arc of history bends towards justice–he thinks we are the ones who have to make it bend that way. We can’t do that if we are all talking past each other all the time.
