Embracing Reality

"The greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people." — Martin Luther King Jr.

Our society succeeds or fails depending on whether we choose to act or avoid.

In his 1958 book "Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story," Martin Luther King Jr. lamented that "the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people." This is a theme King would come back to throughout his life. Society fails by evasion and the passive refusal to disquiet the social arrangements that benefit us.

Our avoidance begins in language. Modern civic discourse is filled with convenient abstractions. The meanings of clarion words such as “freedom,” “values” and “justice” are only what we make of them. This can serve to obscure the lived realities of people that would otherwise provoke responsibility. All sides in our fractured discourse use the same words to evoke different meanings in their audiences, deflecting moral consensus and instilling apathy.

American social realist painter Ben Shahn’s work confronts our evasive abstractions. Working in the early- and mid-twentieth century, Shahn explicated the economic and social conditions faced by working class Americans. In his 1934 painting "Unemployment," he pushes viewers past the abstract economic term and captures the anxious reality of living without a job during the Great Depression. He depicts the pensive postures and looks of men waiting and hoping to make their daily bread. We see and feel the lived reality of multiple people with stories that can't be reduced to a single dispensable term. The longer we look, the more we are moved by this reality.

Confronting reality requires courage because reality implicates. It places us inside a story we might prefer to observe from a distance without obligations. Martin Luther King Jr and Ben Shahn refused to avoid the realities of their time, and they changed the world.

1. Martin Luther King Jr, "Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story" (1958).
2. Ben Shahn, "Unemployment" (1934).