I want to thank Dr. Cloud, Dr. Pezzullo, Dr. Simons, and the others who have given us the chance to recognize injustice and discrimination and to act for justice and equality. Predictably, this opportunity has often been met with vitriol. Sadly, we ignore our literature on social movements and our field's devotion to MLK, preferring to cling to comfort and rationalizations and our culture of convenience. So we swat at the gadflies in our midst and stridently denounce the hardships of inconvenience and conscience. Our ready embrace of the consumer identity and neglect of the worker and activist has landed us in a fine mess in so many ways that it may behoove us to remember the words of
Dr. King (and Plato's Aristophanes on love): "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere"; "lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily"; "We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed"; "injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured"; "We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right" ("Letter from a Birmingham Jail"). We
have too often decided not to honor picket lines and fight for workers' rights over the past thirty years, and now we are poorer for it. We congratulate ourselves for voting and declare an historic victory for equality, while overlooking the inequality many still suffer. I thank my colleagues for giving us the opportunity at this inconvenient moment to practice our politics (whatever our positions) with pained awareness instead of blissful ignorance.

Kevin DeLuca
Kevin.DeLuca@utah.edu