A Footnote, At Best

Well now. It seems on May 1st, events rather overtook my little tantrum about going in to work the bookstore's annual inventory on a sunny Sunday, didn't they? A couple of curious things about that evening. The news of Osama bin Laden's death was not, as I'd first assumed, unknown in the bookstore that evening. Some of the kids in the Technology Center, naturally, actually heard the President's announcement and did in fact tell others, just not anyone who might then have mentioned it to me. I heard about the successful raid on the compound in Pakistan only when I turned on the radio in my car on the way home, roughly around midnight. (We finished the inventory much earlier this year. Well done.) The other thing that startled me more than a little, though really it ought not to have, considering the instantaneous nature of news nowadays, and again, the relative youth and hence computer savvy of so many of my coworkers, was that by the time I'd got home and onto the Internet myself, any number of people who'd spent the whole evening with me counting temporary tattoos and the like, had actually already posted their reactions on facebook, some of them at least before the body, as they say, was cold. Remarkable times.

One of the more heartfelt postings I read when I myself went trawling for reactions to the news among my wide Internet acquaintance, quickly became something of a story in and of itself:

‎"I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that."

This, in all innocence I don't doubt, was posted everywhere. As everyone now surely knows, the quote subsequently turned out to be something more, or at least other than what The Reverend Dr. King had actually written:

“Let us move now from the practical how to the theoretical why: Why should we love our enemies? The first reason is fairly obvious. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction.”

This taken from Strength to Love specifically, Chapter 5, Section 2, I learned from the articles, again online, to which I found myself directed the next morning. I haven't checked this information against the published text because I do not own a copy of the book, nor did we have one at the bookstore today.

I don't mean to disappoint any of the controversialists still eager to engage the debate on either the moral, legal or geopolitical justification of killing bin Laden, or to comment on the unfortunate "virality" -- new word to me --of either the muddled quote or the equally rapid correction thereto. (Neither however do I mean to be coy, so let me just say, not that anyone is asking, that I'm glad bin Laden is dead, and that I personally feel not one whit of disquiet knowing that it was a covert mission of the U.S. military, at the behest of the President of the United States, that sent Navy Seals secretly into the sovereign nation of Pakistan to shoot that man in the head. Make of that what you will.) My one, admittedly inconsequential contribution to the ongoing discussion of this historic event and the resulting celebrations and controversies would be to make note here of the fact that the authors of the first three of the online sources of the correction to the MLK quote, at least that I happened to read, made a point of specifically stating that it was a book in which they found the correct text.

Not much of a point, considering the import of the rest, is it? Still. As I've already said, that was my first instinct as well, to find the quote in a book, though I have not had access myself to the book in question. But then, I'm not actually young myself, and though I do have a cellphone, and obviously use the computer regularly, I'm about as far from the cutting edge of either technology or breaking news as one can get without actually being Amish, if you will allow me just a little exaggeration. That someone known only to me as "unclefred" -- from the look of him, a sporty young fellow in Bellingham, WA, who seems mostly to tweet about baseball -- likewise went to consult print immediately, I think good.

Another welcome surprise.