Civic holidays like the one that commemorates Martin Luther King Jr.’s Birthday provide an opportunity for me to reflect on what I think about the big stories we (U.S. citizens) tell about our nation, and how my views have changed as I’ve aged and the world has evolved. I find myself increasingly aggrieved by how significant portions of my faith community choose to interpret the significance of Dr. King’s legacy, and whether it does or doesn’t influence our mass voting behavior.

As a child of late 20th century U.S. schooling (both public and parochial), when taught about Dr. King and his legacy the artifact of choice was typically his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech and the March on Washington it accompanied. The speech and event were framed as one additional wrung on the ladder of the U.S.’s inevitable ascent towards liberty.

As I got older Letter from a Birmingham Jail took a place of greater prominence. Having spent most of my life participating in predominately white, conservative Christian communities, it wasn’t until college that I was awakened to the many complications and half-truths found in the K-12 narrative I was taught about U.S. history. The letter’s pointed message towards white moderates (like myself) remains an important and bracing critique.

Now, I’ve entered a stage of life where my civic/public consciousness has me turning more frequently to King’s Mountaintop speech. The speech’s charismatic (pentacostal) prophetic edge, and dogged determination to hold the U.S. to our highest stated ideals feels particularly relevant in an era when Federal policy is defined by cruelty and antagonism towards the most vulnerable members of our social fabric. The speech spends time reflecting on the parable of the Good Samaritan, with a small excerpt here:

And so the first question that the Levite asked was, “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”

That’s the question before you tonight.

I remain committed to practicing the faith (and still hold many of the doctrinal markers) engendered by my upbringing in evangelical Christianity. To our collective shame, many of my fellow white Evangelicals remain the bedrock supporters of a Federal administration that sees an increasing number of its citizens, other residents, and sojourners as threats to be neutralized rather than people who deserve to be treated with the equality demanded by our laws. I was told growing up that character is destiny when it comes to political leadership, and to see this principle abandoned for political expediency leaves a bitter aftertaste I can’t fully rinse out. I (perhaps naively) still believe the character axiom was basically correct.

May the parable of the Good Samaritan and the public witness of Believers like Dr. King–in partnership with the Holy Spirit–work like seeds sown into the hearts of my fellow evangelicals. I pray they not walk the same path as the Pharoahs in the book of Exodus and instead stop their hearts from hardening further.

Find a key excerpt of the Mountaintop speech here:

YouTube Video

Find the full speech here:

YouTube Video

My family has maintained a relationship to Chicago’s Brown Line.

For the years that we lived in central Illinois my parents would periodically take my sister and I to the city for a day or weekend excursion. Ostensibly we were there to visit my grandmother in Bridgeport (a Red Line stop) or my cousins in the suburbs, but we would also find an excuse to take the bikes down to the lakefront for a ride from the Adler Planetarium to the Lincoln Park zoo, or a jaunt up and down lake shore drive. We’d also ride the El. We’d take the Brown Line to Sedgwick and eat at the Old Jerusalem Restaurant.

When I lived in Wheaton I’d keep up the pattern and find excuses to take the Brown Line to Old Town or Lincoln Park. My future spouse lived not far from the Diversey stop for a time.

The CTA maintains a playlist of ‘Ride the Rails’ videos. The production values have improved incrementally over time. I find it comforting to pull one up and ride along for a couple stops. The familiar “doors closing” cadence and the click-clack of the tracks acts a bit like a breathe prayer. The Brown Line remains my favorite.

The artistic director of this film would go on to lead artistic direction for the first Ghost in the Shell film. I wouldn’t call it’s aesthetic vision cyberpunk though. I’d propose something else, like cassettepunk, or maybe CosmodromePunk. I think a lot of the videos this YT channel makes could fall into that aesthetic.

YouTube Video

The Pitt is the first TV show where the reaction videos are more intriguing to me than the drama of the show itself. Maybe its just the anti-science cultural moment we seem to be living through right now, but there is something mesmerizing about watching what I presume to be subject matter experts break down the difference between drama and reality featured in the show.

I’m sure some of the reaction videos are just algorithm chasing, but for now I’ll lean into them and hope we haven’t become socially isolated by our media echo chambers that we can no longer accept expertise as a valuable resource for policymaking.

Side-note: television programming rarely makes me cry, but a particular scene from the show where the main protagonist starts having PTSD related flashbacks to COVID era ER memories momentarily broke me. Our understanding of what happened that first year of COVID has become so obscured by our partisan bickering over public health policy that I feel like we completely forgot the absolute hell our medical providers were subjected to not only by the wave of deaths, but the politicized backlash they received for their efforts to flatten the curve.

The Andor series dropped a season 2 trailer announcing an April 22 release date.

Instead of posting the new trailer, I’m just gonna post one of the many moments of writing that made this show a revelation:

I fear for you.

We’ve been sleeping.

We’ve had each other and Ferrix, our work, our days.

We had each other, and they left us alone.

We kept the trade lanes open, and they left us alone.

We took their money and ignored them. We kept their engines turning and the moment they pulled away we forgot them.

Because we had each other.

We had Ferrix.

But we were sleeping. I’ve been sleeping. I’ve been turning away from a truth I’ve wanted not to face.

There is a wound that won’t heal at the center of the galaxy.

There is a darkness like rust, reaching into everything around us.

We let it grow and now it’s here. It’s here and it’s not visiting anymore.

It want’s to stay.

The Empire is a disease that thrives in darkness. It is never more alive than when we sleep…

Today, the U.S. supreme court is hearing oral arguments on a case involving Tennessee law with implications on whether states can ban gender affirming care for minors. I’m neither a constitutional lawyer, nor a medical expert - but I do hang out in conservative online forums, and when this topic comes up I inevitably see vitriol and violent rhetoric directed at the families and medical teams involved in gender affirming care circumstances. I see accusations of being butchers, mutilators, perverts and quacks. I once read a pamphlet published by an accredited Christian college that argued trans and queer social activists were a greater threat to the continuation of the U.S. than ISIS. It’s just gross. These families and medical professionals are often times facing difficult decisions about how best to support minors in acute embodied distress. For many of these kids this stuff has life or death implications.

This is why I personally despise framing culture-warring as some sort of civic or religious virtue. For a community that frequently asserts their fidelity to “judeo-christian” values, when it comes to discussing this particular cultural flashpoint I rarely see a single fruit of the spirit show up in the discussion. Let’s not dehumanize trans kids, their families, or their doctors.