In 1968 there was ambiguous information out there about MLK. It was anything but clear how his story was going to come to be told. In a very important sense, in 1968 MLK was not M ... L ... K. This isn't easy to see clearly now.
Just how significant is the issue we're dealing with? I think it's a supreme magnitude issue but I've been wrong many times in the past with how I've assessed things -- and even if I've gotten it right this time, well, that's certainly no guarantee of the right outcome. It was only around 390 B.C. that Plato put all the pieces together and figured out the great historical significance of the Greek city-state system. That was the moment, of course, that a world tyrant named Alexander came on the stage and destroyed the system. Today there are a lot of cities around the world named Alexandria. (Most of those aren't nice places to live, for what it's worth.)
We're in the flow of deeper channels than most of us usually think about. I think those of us who sympathize with Mutari have already weighed ambiguous evidence and reached our sympathetic conclusions. And it's that sympathy that should decide the next thing for us. For what does it mean to tell ourselves we sympathize with him if what we really feel is disagreement with what he's doing? We may feel it's inadvisable, we may feel we wouldn't do what he's doing if it was us instead of him. That's armchair quarterbacking. The fight is on for him and he's carefully weighed everything he can think about and decided to fight the fight according to the way he sees the lay of the land immediately in front of him. In the final analysis those of us who sympathize with him probably want to extend sympathy into deference to the tough calls he's having to make.
Above I referred to MLK and Alexander -- exceptional figures from the past -- and the comparison seems ridiculous on its face because Mutari is just an ordinary chap like you and me. So let me tell you about an ordinary chap I know who wasn't looking for anything significant to happen in his life when an ambitious politician goosestepped into Poland. Five years later this ordinary chap found himself in Italy in charge of 40 other ordinary chaps, ordered to hold onto the top of a mountain while completely surrounded by 160 German soldiers for three days. He made a lot of iffy decisions on the basis of ambiguous information. In retrospect they were the right decisions (though the men who died up there might take issue with that) but the mountain was held and the battle "won" and this ordinary chap passed into utter obscurity and thereafter meant very little to anyone other than his family. But for three days he felt like the weight of the world was standing on his chest and he was making horrendous decisions that were going to turn out wrong if other people he couldn't control didn't make other horrendous decisions that would turn his decisons right -- and as far as I can tell it's the cumulation of large numbers of stories like his that determine whether the coin comes up heads or tails in the bigger picture. Damn.
You've got a little mountaintop to hold onto ... as does Mutari and many other people. We're all so busy with our own that we're probably best off not spending much time second-guessing each other once the bullets start flying anywhere. None of us knows how the big story is going to come out if each of us, individually, does what he thinks is right when crises hit in our own little stories.
We only know how it'll come out if we don't.