In Other Words, Why We Can't Wait

(Note: This morning, my summer-school students are writing a paraphrase of the introduction to Martin Luther King Jr.'s Why We Can't Wait, which appeared on the 1989 AP English Language exam, to get them ready to write an essay analyzing King's rhetoric. I decided to play along here, but I'm going to paraphrase King's introduction without making any direct references to race. It's interesting to me that so little has changed, even though so much has.)

So this is the new year.

In the North, I see a young boy sitting on the front steps of one of many run-down apartment buildings. The smell of refuse seeps out of the door behind him. His days are encounters with alcoholics, with addicts, with the homeless. He goes to a school, one of those that never has enough money, enough teachers, enough textbooks, enough time. His father looks for work, but can't find it or can't keep it. His mother is gone much of the time, working as a housekeeper to the rich several hours away.

In the South, I see a young girl sitting on the front steps of one of the aging shotgun homes. Some people would call it a shack, but for her family, it is home. The roof is in danger, the paint is cracked and peeling. Six or so small children, partially clothed, are running around the house. The girl has been a mother to them after her mother died in a car accident. People in the neighborhood say that if the ambulance had been faster, or if it could have taken her to the hospital on the other side of town, her mother might have survived. Her father is a porter in one of the department stores downtown. He will never do more than this, stocking shelves and carrying the packages of the rich.

Half a country apart, this boy and this girl are wondering: Why is life filled with such misery? Did their ancestors do something, centuries ago, to deserve such ill treatment? Are their families cursed? Had they failed to serve their country? Had they failed to defend their nation against some enemy?

The history books they read at school are incomplete. But they both know something of the parts of the past that have been kept out of the history books. They know their ancestors were at Valley Forge with George Washington. They know that one of their forebears was the first to die in the American Revolution. The boy heard from a teacher at church that one of his ancestors had designed D.C. One time, the girl had heard a speaker at school explain how those who had come before her had shaped the land, built houses, farmed the land; how they had lifted the American nation from its place as a lowly colony to its position as a dominant world power.

Anywhere there was work, work that was difficult, dangerous, dirty--mining, shipping, building--their fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers had carried more than their share of the burden.

The white-washed history books in school told how the nation had struggled to become a bastion of freedom. How it had fought wars in the name of making people free.

The boy and girl knew more than history: they knew the present. They knew about the struggles around the world to throw off the shackles of imperialism. They knew the struggles of their parents, whose futures were bleak in spite of their hard work. They knew that people were kept from jobs they were qualified for because of who they knew, or because of where they lived. They knew that the words freedom, liberty, and rights were talked about more than they were lived.

They were seeing on television, hearing from the radio, reading in newspapers that America was the country that defended freedom.

But freedom's ring was dulled, a ringing mocking hollow sound, when--in the short life span of this boy and girl--people were unable to travel; protesters were mocked and imprisoned; brutality was on the rise; people were tortured; and still, jobs were won through nepotism instead of merit.

It was a new year. Was liberty a fact? Had freedom become impotent?

The boy stood up. The girl rose. Miles apart, they lifted their eyes to the sky. Together, holding hands in spirit if not in body, they stepped forward. One step, but a firm one that changed the course of the most opulent, most powerful nation.

This is the story of that boy and that girl. This is the story of Why We Can't Wait.