In a speech last night delivered much like one of his wonderful editorials, Leonard Pitts, Jr., brought up the concept of the “Beloved Community”.  He borrowed these words from Martin Luther King, Jr. and I believe they were a play on the title of a book by Alan Paton, a South African, who wrote Cry the Beloved Country in 1948. Mr. Pitts did a masterful job of weaving many motifs in his presentation that is a hall-mark of his editorials about race, religion and the experience of the poor in America.

I spoke to him briefly as we moved from dinner to the sanctuary of Temple Israel of South Dade.  I told him that I was jealous of his ability but in my usual fashion I left out an important word or two and he replied he wasn’t sure of my meaning.  But we moved on and the next I saw him he was on the Bimah waiting for his introduction.  I only meant that I was in awe of his prodigious talents as a writer and thinker.  He was very good as a speaker and his courses must be extremely well attended for he puts words together that would put most academics to shame.

What speakers and writers of Mr. Pitts’ caliber are able to do is to clarify the thinking of inactive people who see injustice but who do not know what to do about it.  They cluck their tongues a lot and bewail the fact that something ought to be done about it.  He pointed out that Beloved Communities are formed in childhood experiences. He predicted that using South Florida and particularly Miami as a model, America will be changed in the years to come.  Our Beloved Communities will no longer resemble what we think of as Eotopia, good places; it will be different

But, Mr. Pitts was not happy with the idea of utopia.  Utopia stills carries a connotation of hapless thinkers who haven’t thought out all the problems and answered all the questions.  His idea of the Beloved Community was and is bound up in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. who talked about poor people who lived together and had to get together to help themselves and not wait for others to come in from the outside to do it for them.  At least, that is what I think he meant.  Mr. Pitts referred to the Beloved Community many times and in reference to good people getting together and helping to raise its children and protecting its people from the actual world where drugs and violence ruled.

I find it both confusing and comforting that Mr. Pitts could articulate the existence of little Beloved Communities within the dystopian real world showing our human ability to compartmentalize our little utopias of goodness that still succeed and produce such capable, articulate bringers of messages of hope to the rest of us. If we could get together and build the Beloved Community, we could put an end to war and build a better rational world.