Sunday Morning Coming Down

16 April 1963 My Dear Fellow Clergymen: While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities "unwise and untimely." Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work. This is the beginning of Martin Luther King's "Letter From  Birmingham Jail."  I was twelve years old when it was written and lived a very sheltered living in Bensenville, Illinois.  Through high school there were no black students in any of my classes and none in other District 2 or District 100 schools.  According to 2010 Census figures Bensenville has a population of about 18,000 and about 3.5% is African American. On Good Friday, April 12, 1963, King violated a court injunction prohibiting public civil right...

In 1993, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D., N.Y.) coined the phrase  “defining deviancy down.”* Moynihan’s thesis was that, as a society, America has been “re-defining deviancy” so as to exempt conduct previously stigmatized, and quietly raising the “normal” level for behavior that was abnormal by earlier standards. ” When “deviance is defined down,” the standards by which society lives change; that change is never for the better. George Will: There is no such thing as rock bottom. So, assume that the worst is yet to come. He was speaking of the current president and the senate repubicans.