Ronald R. Sundstrom - Ronald R. Sundstrom

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Ronald R. Sundstrom

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More or Less (An Occasional Blog)

Narratives of Freedom Course

Lessons of this Hour

This is the unedited version of a piece for the "Fierce Urgency of Now" blog, written on 9/25/25, and initially published on 10/6/25.

As the inaugural King-Jones Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Nonviolence and Social Justice (INSJ), I welcome, with gratitude and excitement, the opportunity to work with the Leo T. McCarthy Center to do my part in furthering the missions of both organizations. The importance of that mission is glaringly clear in our day and time, as our university community, along with the City of San Francisco, the state of California, and the nation, face current social and political challenges that are both unsettling and threatening.

The INSJ began at USF in 2018 and was cofounded by Dr. Clarence B. Jones and Jonathan D. Greenberg. Their mission was to “disseminate the teachings and strategies of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi in response to the moral emergencies of the 21st century.” During the fall semester of this year, after years of service to the USF community, Johnathan announced he was retiring from the institute, and three fellowships would be created to carry out INSJ’s mission, and the King-Jones Faculty Fellowship is one of them.

It is an honor to carry on Jonathan’s work and, in collaboration with the McCarthy Center, the mission of the INSJ. I am a professor of philosophy, and I have devoted my career to thinking, writing, and teaching about the values I learned as a youth to cherish from the lessons of King and others who stood for moral personhood, liberty, equality, and justice.

King, with Clarence B. Jones at his side as friend, lawyer, and advisor, along with a league of national and community leaders, strove to bring our nation closer to making a whole lot more real its ideal of equal liberty, equality, and justice.

He, like we are doing right now, confronted dark times. As is now as well as then, darkness sparks fear. In his sermon “The Antidote to Fear,” from around 1963, King wrote: “In these days of catastrophic change and calamitous uncertainty, is there any man who does not experience the depression and bewilderment of crippling fear, which, like a nagging hound of hell, pursues our every footstep?”

Those words echo similar words written by Frederick Douglass in 1894, some sixty-nine years earlier. Douglass, at the end of his life, confronted an epidemic of lynching at the rise of Jim Crow laws. He wrote in “The Lessons of the Hour:” “I have sometimes thought that the American people are too great to be small, too just and magnanimous to oppress the weak, too brave to yield up the right to the strong… I have fondly hoped that this estimate of American character would soon cease to be contradicted or put in doubt. But the favor with which this cowardly proposition of disfranchisement has been received by public men…has shaken my faith in the nobility of the nation. I hope and trust all will come out right in the end, but the immediate future looks dark and troubled. I cannot shut my eyes to the ugly facts before me.”

Among those ugly facts are that over the last ten years, America experienced the rise and fall of a censorious and intolerant popular culture, especially among the most online and “progressive” Americans. Fueled by social media and a craving for scandal, retribution, and social validation, all while performing a smug, puritanical self-righteous attitude. Such cultural warriors were willing to wield what is essentially mob power to influence business, media platforms, and educational institutions to punish and cancel (or “hold accountable” or “call out” in their self-justifying narrative) those they deem have said or done something outside the bounds of acceptable opinion.

And as socially and politically corrosive and counter-productive as that was, In recent months, we have seen a rise in political violence and the use of government power to silence speech, punish political opponents and critics, stigmatize and mark as socially and culturally untouchable whole categories of people who they deem un-American, infringe on civil rights of citizens and the legal rights of migrants, unleash the American military against American cities, as well as wage a legal and similar cultural war against those who oppose or do not support the presidential administration’s policies or ideology.

One of those ugly facts is that in recent months, we have seen a rise in political violence and the use of government power to silence speech, punish political opponents and critics, stigmatize and mark as socially and culturally untouchable whole categories of people who they deem un-American, infringe on civil rights of citizens and the legal rights of migrants, unleash the American military against American cities, as well as wage a legal and similar cultural war against those who oppose or do not support the presidential administration’s policies or ideology.

What lessons to this hour do Douglass’s and King’s antidotes to fear hold for us?

Douglass urged Americans in his time to hold on firmly to the “principles of justice, liberty, and perfect human equality,” the core values of the Declaration of Independence. King entreated us to face our fears, to have courage, and to master our fears through love and faith. The American values that Douglass asked Americans to be faithful to and to fight for, and the virtues that make up King’s antidote, might strike some as naive or even absurd, given the cruelty and daily bold-faced assault on our nation’s constitution, laws, norms, and just plain everyday human civility and compassion. Douglass’s plaintive words from 1894 seem written for us, in our time now. And we, like him then, say, “I cannot shut my eyes to the ugly facts before me.”

King did not counsel shutting our eyes. Instead, he said we must face those fears. About his own fears, he wrote, “I have been forced to muster what strength and courage I have to withstand howling winds of pain and jostling storms of adversity.” We must muster our strength and put it to work.

How? King lit the way: “Hatred and bitterness can never cure the disease of fear; only love can do that. Hatred paralyzed life; love releases it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.”

It sounds soft, but it is a stone-cold truth. We can realize it by caring for the community around us, and not just the communities we are in and the neighbors we are familiar with. Get involved, even if it is in the tiniest way. Be open to perceived political opponents by tapping into our shared humanity and remaining in conversation with them. Practice what my friend and fellow philosopher Robert Talisse calls civic solitude. Step away from the whirlwind of social and political outrage, hate, and invective coming from the Left and Right extremes that have infested media, social or otherwise. In that blessed quiet, think for yourself. And then vote!

As we find our way through this dark time, we should draw on the wisdom that both Douglass and King took heart in from the Book of Isaiah:

“If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted…then your light shall rise in the darkness…Your ancient ruins will be rebuilt [and] you shall be called the repairer of the breach.”

Let us join together to take hold of those proverbial fallen stones and, in our small way, help to repair the breach.