The Living Help, Helios, 43rd Day of Hagwinter, 524 M.E.

People tell me I need to prepare for the coming times and adjust to the new normal. Things are what they are, and the sooner I accept it the better off I'll be.

We're all counseled to live a well-adjusted life and avoid the neurotic and schizophrenic tendencies that may result from maladjustment, but I categorically reject that advice. I've never found comfort in normalcy, and I don't want to adjust to what I'm being told to accept. On this issue, I side with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Speaking at Southern Methodist University on March 17, 1966, King said, "I must honestly say there are some things in our nation and the world to which I am proud to be maladjusted, and wish all men of goodwill would be maladjusted until the good society is realized."

"I never intend to adjust myself to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to become adjusted to a religious bigotry. I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few, leaving millions of people smothering in an air-tight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society. I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism and the self-defeating effects of physical violence."

Where these issues are concerned, we need maladjusted men and women. In his speech, King called for the formation of an International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment. He wanted men and women like the maladjusted prophet Amos, who in the midst of the injustices of his day, cried for justice to roll down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream. Maladjusted like Lincoln, who had the vision to see that this nation could not survive half slave and half free. 

"As maladjusted as that great Virginian Thomas Jefferson," King said, "who in the midst of an age amazingly adjusted to slavery, could scratch words across the pages of history, words lifted to cosmic proportions: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.' 

"As maladjusted as Jesus Christ, who could say to the men and women around the Galilean hills, 'Love your enemies. Bless them that curse you. Pray for them that despitefully use you.'

Through such maladjustment, may we be able to emerge from this bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man and into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice. May we all be appropriately maladjusted.