It is simply by happenstance that this year’s Black History Month begins as I am reading Howard Thurman’s Deep is the Hunger. I first read this classic shortly after it was published in the mid-70s. I came across it when a good friend John Lewis – no, not that John Lewis – accompanied me to a bookstore in Atlanta’s West End, the Shrine of the black Madonna.
https://www.shrinebookstore.com/ The bookstore is still there. It is not an overstatement to say the book changed my life.
The book is as relevant today that’s when it was originally written. Bob Dylan was wrong; “The times” – it seems – are not “ah-changing.”
Thurman makes a compelling case for non-violence, noting that violence never leads to authentic victory. It may lead to a temporary illusion of victory after devastating destruction. (i.e.: the World Wars of last century.) But more often victory through violence intoxicates the victor with a false sense of superiority that leads to, well, Donald Trump.
I am not claiming the World Wars should not have been fought – though I do question the use of the atomic bombs. I would argue that we mismanaged the peace – much like we did after the Civil War – never acknowledging that the cancer the enemy had unleashed had metastasized within our own borders and would grow to be Trump. Oh, we were so naive! We thought Democracy would magically cure all evil and forgot that evil lurks amongst us.
