Monday, January 16, 2017

Don't Let the Door Hit You Where the Good Lord Split You

Over the past couple of years, I’ve shared pictures and penned two MLK-related blogs with the social media world, both of which have quickly become some of the most highly read of the 321 posts I put heart, soul, and clarity into. As we all know Friday, January 20, 2017 is the day the transfer of power from Barack Obama to Donald Trump officially happens, I need to share a few words of advice to those who may not be as “woke” as well as those who only seek the day off from work or school to go shopping or otherwise lay on the couch all day for Netflix instead of doing something productive.

Don’t let the door hit you where the good Lord split you.

For all of what we have been told in school and our mainstream shows about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., we hear less about how he used the day’s technology to advance nonviolence than simply sitting at home rifling tweetstorms about the struggle playing woe is me. You don’t bring the black civil rights fight to the forefront without knowing how to capture sympathetic hearts by portraying the horrors of American racism as skillfully as he did. One may also surmise that people dressed better in public, but this was also a time when black children were hosed by fire hydrants and snarled at by dogs and mobs alike as they marched in their Sunday best exposing the inhumanity of our fellow man. Of course, being a learned man (educated at Morehouse and Harvard, among institutions) in addition to following the call to enter the ministry, King also spoke with a fervor reserved for very few others in history!


When he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo in 1964, King reminded us not to let our moral progress fall behind our progress in science and technology.

“Modern man has brought this whole world to an awe-inspiring threshold of the future. He has reached new and astounding peaks of scientific success. He has produced machines that think and instruments that peer into the unfathomable ranges of interstellar space. He has built gigantic bridges to span the seas and gargantuan buildings to kiss the skies. His airplanes and spaceships have dwarfed distance, placed time in chains, and carved highways through the stratosphere. This is a dazzling picture of modern man’s scientific and technological progress.”

“Yet, in spite of these spectacular strides in science and technology, and still unlimited ones to come, something basic is missing. There is a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually. We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers.”

“Every man lives in two realms, the internal ad the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live. Our problem today is that we have allowed the internal to become lost in the external. We have allowed the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live. So much for modern life can be summarized in the arresting dictum of the poet Thoreau:  “Improved means to an unimproved end.” This is the serious predicament, the deep and haunting problem confronting modern man. If we are to survive today, our moral and spiritual “lag” must be eliminated. Enlarged material powers spell enlarged peril if there is not proportionate growth of the soul. When the “without” of man’s nature subjugates the “within”, dark storm clouds begin to form in the world.”

When you think about it, tech has come a long way since these words were uttered some fifty-three years ago.


In King’s day, Americans (when they weren’t being openly discriminatory toward black Americans through Jim Crow) were certified ass-kickers:  Consider the space race against Russia or the creation of the interstate highway system and the trickle-down effects of both. Without the innovative spirit of some and President Eisenhower’s vision of travelling the USA in a Chevrolet after seeing the German autobahn, we may still venture up and down two-lane dirt roads or worse, walk everywhere.


With the advent of the internet, the world has become so much closer to us as we are able to carry on constructive and destructive discussions with others across the world. Ideas are expanded – and sometime debunked, yet the compassion we should feel for our brothers whom we see daily is lacking. This weekend pays lip service to getting along, but come Tuesday morning, we are quick to flip the bird at the bro-dozer driver who just cut us off in rush hour traffic or cast ill-formed judgments of people who don’t look or live like us.

You can have all of the things in the world and be materially rich, but if you are emotionally and spiritually poor, then your life and its pursuits are all for naught.

How does technology factor today relative to what King spoke of in Oslo? More than you think – and closer to home than many would expect.

We have become immune to our spiritual needs and concerns with our brothers and sisters by replacing them with stuff. When we have to have an argument about something as fundamental as health insurance for the less fortunate knowing many of us are one paycheck away from being in their shoes, then we have a problem with our relationships with God AND the people we live, work, play, and generally interact with.


And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren, yet have done it unto me. - Matthew 25:40

Your iPhone, Yeti coolers, and Facebook/Twitter pages won’t get you anywhere near Heaven; ditto for the McMansion and hiding behind rags that represent symbols.

If you think otherwise…don’t let the door hit you where the good Lord split you.

Technology has also made us a bit standoffish – when we meet for drinks after work (I work overnights – having a beer at 7 am is not an issue for me), I don’t want to talk to your Samsung. I’m here to visit with YOU. Put the damn phone down. Otherwise, I could have stayed at home with my Miller Lite and engaged you via Twitter.

Don’t let the door hit you where the good Lord split you.

Not only am I certain that King would have endorsed Black Lives Matter, but age 88 he still would have been on the frontlines or in an advisory capacity; unfortunately, we would never know that because many of my black heroes and heroines did not have the privilege of living to a kindly old age as a result of standing up for their beliefs in the face of sheer white hatred.
Do #AllLivesMatter in this image? Thought so.

We live in an age where technology has really improved life for all of us, yet the manner in which we use it further insulates us from reality. Take a look at your friends/followers list:  Do the majority of them look/act/work/play/worship with you? If so, it may be time to expand the social bubble a bit. Remember, Jesus didn’t just associate Himself with one type of man as evidenced by His disciples and their previous occupations before they decided to follow Him. He used men who were in various positions of their lives many of which were what we know as working stiffs to change the hearts, minds, and souls of Jews and Gentiles alike as God commissioned.

Is this what we really want when we ask God to enlarge our territories, or is it all for short-term material gains such as a new job, a more reliable vehicle, a smarter home, or Mr. or Ms. Right?

That gap has further exacerbated in the schools as well – and I’ll use the ones here in Arkansas as an example. Depending on what side of town you live on, where are the new campuses built, and where are the old ones closed? What if the school on the other side of the tracks is doing a better job of educating its students than that brand new building over there with the campus wide Wi-Fi? What do we really have to make of School Choice, or is that for schools to resegregate themselves as the ones in Hot Spring County has done such a marvelous job of? Looks like good ol’ racism is better than pooling the sources to advance together for a lot of people – and these days, the state Legislature is helping them out. In defense of Gov. Asa Hutchinson, I am glad he is promoting computer science in all schools statewide except with one caveat:  What happens to those future programmers who do not have internet at home or the wherewithal to afford compilers to check their work, and how do we solve speed? Internet is ideally the same everywhere, but bandwidth in Bentonville is nothing like what students in Lake Village – or even Bigelow – have to work with.

Again, while we advance to places we never could have imagined just five years ago, we must not lag spiritually or morally in fear of letting the door hit us on the way out where the good Lord split us.

Technology can become a zero-sum game but it doesn’t have to be. We have drones that can wipe out whole populations with the push of a button as quickly as they can deliver a pizza to our homes. Consequently, we must remain vigilant of a world that increasingly puts new gadgets in our hands to take our eye off the ball so the bidding of evildoers can be done in the dark. Those dark clouds have been forming for the past several years, and it is only now that the larger populace is awakening to what is surrounding us:  the haves taking the meager possessions from the have-nots and casting their lots upon the altars of lower taxes and white privilege in a last-gasp attempt to hoard all of the wealth and power.



Treason is in the air and too many of you do not care because you’re too busy making America white again. I know the #MAGA logo, but to me, it looks more like #MAWA – and this place could eff around and end up like apartheid-era South Africa was some thirty years ago if you don’t stop playing!

King warned all of us about this day some fifty-three years ago and apparently no one really took heed to it. Now we seem to be paying the price with the Trump administration and a Congress that blatantly shows fealty to “Republican Jesus” rather than use all of the advances technology has made for the greater good.

If all you know about Brother Martin is “I Have a Dream” and not what he stood for before and after that hot summer afternoon in August 1963…

Don’t let the door hit you where the good Lord split you. 
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1 comment:

  1. Rickey GeeJanuary 15, 2017 at 7:22 PM

    Wow! This is such a good read and you made some valid points.

    ReplyDelete

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