We need more 'creative extremists'

Last spring, I spoke to some suburban Montreal high school students about Martin Luther King, Jr. I began by asking the students who their heroes were. Of 27 students, two said their fathers, three mentioned friends, three others picked random leaders, two identified superheroes -- Batman and Spiderman -- nine specified particular sports stars or rock stars, and nine said they had no hero at all.

Although in our current educational climate guests are supposed to mollify rather than confront, I challenged this shocking conclusion. "Don't you think it is disturbing that a collection of intelligent and energetic students cannot find heroes who matter?" I asked. "It seems you either worship useless celebrities, or nobody." The students bristled. After feebly attempting to praise Michael Jordan's generosity and glorify the value of building your body through sports, one student, in that exasperated tone modern teenagers reserve for their elders, sighed: "You don't understand the world we live in. This is our world, celebrities and sports stars." I responded that this was precisely what I understood, and abhorred.

"Well, of course it's different now," another student added. "Heroes from the past like King, Mahatma Gandhi and Winston Churchill faced all these serious problems and solved them. We don't face such serious problems." As I reeled off a litany of problems from terrorism to poverty, the student acknowledged, "I guess there are problems, but we don't really feel them where we live."

The student was right. Even after Sept. 11 and the stock market bust, most Americans, let alone Canadians, remain happily insulated. Most of us, thankfully, live in cozy cocoons where our great challenges revolve around how to spend our leisure time and fritter away our disposable income. Most of the coddled students of the middle- and upper-middle-class, represented by the students I met, may struggle with the stresses of careerism and the strains of modern relationships. Nevertheless, few have experienced the direct dread of terror, the crushing limitations of poverty, the stinging humiliation of injustice.

North America's bounty, as channelled through today's culture of creature comforts, consumerism and celebrity worship, risks depriving our youth of the moral ambition necessary to achieve personal and national greatness. Their social imaginations are cramped and impoverished, hemmed in by the debris of our leisure culture, seduced by the celebrity promise of great fame and endless riches. Consumerism addicts them to convention, just as it has handcuffed us, their elders, to the world that is, for we can only achieve, we can only advance, we can only prosper, if we harness ourselves to the status quo.

Forty years ago today, in his "I Have A Dream" Speech, King challenged us all to do better. King urged his followers not to fear crises. "I must confess that I am not afraid of the word 'tension.' I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth," King had written that spring in his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail." Invoking Socrates' creation of "tension" to free individuals "from the bondage of myths and half-truths" and spur "creative analysis," King called for "nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood."

King even embraced the mantle of "extremist." "Was not Jesus an extremist for love?" he asked. "Was not Amos an extremist for justice?" The question, King taught, "is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be? Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice?" In the 1960s, surrounded by racial prejudice and too much poverty in the land of plenty, King suggested: "Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists."

Only such creative extremists could have the faith that fuelled the dream King articulated so beautifully in Washington four months later. Only they could "hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope," only they could dream of a world where "we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together," without trying to gain "our rightful place" through "wrongful deeds."

Four decades later, we have made great progress. Our corner of the world, thanks partially to King's efforts, is a more tolerant and just place. But much work remains, even here in Canada. We need to resist the twin lures of complacency and consumerism, young and old alike. We, too, need a new generation of "creative extremists," with grandiose dreams of changing the world, and an openness to heroes striving to make the world a better place, not just a more entertaining space.

Gil Troy is professor of history at McGill University and the author of Mr. and Mrs. President: from the Trumans to the Clintons.