You may well ask: "Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.

--Martin Luther King

Last night, I was reading from MLK's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" for my Style and Voice class and I found it difficult to concentrate on the style and voice because the message delivered in the body of voice seemed so...

Outside, in my backyard, is near about six inches of snow; and although my downstairs neighbor has a dog, not a single footprint disrupts this drifted sweep of small space. Each of the radiators in my new apartment makes a different sound: in the dining room, a sound like a tea kettle; in the kitchen, a rattle like someone shaking a broken engine part; in the living room, an occasional hiss; and in my room, just the occasional fizzle like seltzer hitting the water. Yesterday, the snow kept coming down and I got hungry for something sweet, preferably chocolate, but instead peanut-butter cookies worked just fine. c2 made bread, and gave the majority over into my holding; today, I shared it with my classmates for novel writing, and we chewed it over while talking about criticism as an attempt to create someone else's ideal. The snow is grey on the outside, slushed up from cars driving around, but up on the subway platform, it wings in blizzard as the train approaches, tampens down under the heat.

I am dealing with shutting off the gas at my old place, and I’m freaked out because I don't have the key and the landlord isn't picking up and the gas company people say they can't disconnect unless someone is there to let them in. My previous roommate is leaving the country for a couple of weeks and so I am stressed about the utilities that are still in my name. I am also nervous about all the reading; it's like watching someone approach and not knowing how to greet her. Speaking of which, there’s at least one person who recently turned away from me rather than say a simple hello, and another person I’m dodging rather than simply saying I will not. In past month, I've been blown off twice, and offended at least two people. I don't know what job I'll have this summer, and I'm unclear what I'll do once I have this third degree; maybe move to Alaska where at least while lonely, I feel attached, Romantic style, to the landscape. But this is only one maybe. The truth is I have no confidence in my ability to make it. Give me storms on water, and I'm finally a cool cat, but out here, it's downright befuddling.

In his letter, MLK writes: "All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority."

He writes: "Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily."

He writes: "Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively."

And very notably, he writes about "tension," about bringing hidden tension to the foreground in order to transition it into a productive tension that forces the hand of status quo. All over, there is tension, palpable, tender. But it is underneath, as if distance worked in layers and not in linearity.

I haven't lost anyone to death, not to murder, not to bombs, not to terror, not sickness. All the deaths in my life occurred when I was young or even before I was young. I have been lucky (and this is me knocking on wood... right now). I have lost friends though, lost ideals, lost beliefs, trust, love, self-respect; I've tried to make things better that won't be bettered; and even these very smallishly-tiny losses led me to want to learn about how people deal with trauma, how women raped and those who experienced concentration camps, jails, death or revolutions have dealt with mourning and loss.

According to Hans-Jost Frey, "One mourns less for what was than for what can no longer happen now," and as Eric Santner says, “Mourning without solidarity is the beginning of madness.”

Knowing very little about this, I can only receive glimmers of what is going on. It's hard to believe we are engaged in war, that every day bombs explode in marketplaces and somewhere between 50-80 people die as a result. These are not "our" people; these are "their" people. That is, it appears a self-inflicted wound. Why would Iraqis expend so much energy killing off their own?

I imagine the weather must be very hot over there. I wonder what it's like walking down a street... how common an experience is it? Outside, as I mentioned, I've got snow, and inside, as I mentioned, delicious heat. But what are the realities of inside-out over there, and why is this something we don't really know? During Vietnam, America was somehow confronted with the actions of war—through pictures, or press releases, or something like that; whatever it was, there was a felt rumbling. How and why is our moment different?

Palpable tension, not the kind that is hidden. What does it matter if our Democratic Senate says, "bad Bush, bad bad Bush" and rebukes him if nothing truly changes? Why all the resistance to a timetable when it is the only strategy that makes sense? Where are the summits and the serious calls to all Islamic leaders to meet with our leaders and speak about what it is that everyone truly wants? I can't make heads or tails of all the names in play over in Iraq (sheepish), but what I can tell is that there are a number of people with a stake in this, and a number of people we seem to want to destroy. If these leaders have all this power to mobilize (or rile, or stir, or mob, or threaten, or whatever) people, then why haven't we tapped into that power, and instead just hunt and hunt and shoot and launch our stupid helicopters and offenses and open up hostilities to Iran (who may well be courting it, but what do we know since we haven't even engaged with them)?

All these carbombs trucked on into the marketplace, where the poor people go to work, and the poor and middle class folks go to find food; it's like explosions in Safeway or Deals Only. Certainly not a place for "negotiation." So what then? Tension?

I am interested in how firmly MLK tied himself to nonviolence (this is me afterall, someone with an occasional bloodthirst). Christianity aside, perhaps it's because he saw the irreparable length of "productive" time it takes for one to recover from loss, death and despair. With all these people who walk down the street, this street, that street, ride in the back of trucks looking for an unavailable work, who go to mosques to find silence and don’t even find it there—mourning/repair is an item of the future, an unavoidable one.

This is crazy. It is utterly crazy. No sense, absolutely no sense. There is no sense in it, and I can’t get it at all. And worse yet, there is no solidarity and so only madness, and all of us hidden in radiator tension feel no means of bringing things to the forefront to create some, any, new possible option(s). So?