Updated

Why do we always assume the worst?

No indictment in Ferguson?

Then it'll be an inferno in Ferguson.

Says who?

Protesters who seem to want it?

Or maybe an always skeptical media, all but gunning it, and preparing for it?

Me?

I've had enough of it.

Of always counting on bad news, and never the possibility of good news.

I like to think people are better than the caricatures they are sometimes made out to play on TV.

I know some are. But I also like to think most aren't.

That some will respond angrily to no indictment in Ferguson.

Just as some will respond just as angrily to an indictment in Ferguson.

No one knows for sure, just that they're sure this doesn't go well.

Just like I'm sure much the same was said of Martin Luther King's predicted reaction when his house was fire-bombed and destroyed in 1956.

Friends and sympathizers had gathered outside the rubble of his Montgomery, Alabama home, convinced he would call them into action, to no doubt respond in kind.

But he didn't do that his niece Alveda King said for the same reason her own father A.D. King, refused to respond in kind after his house was bombed what point would it serve?

Instead Martin Luther King would urge calm, telling those assembled in his yard that day.

"If you have weapons, take them home. If you do not have them, please do not seek them. We cannot solve this problem through violence. We must meet violence with non-violence."

Many grudgingly complied at the time, but King's grudging quest for peaceful protest would stand the test of time even if sadly, not in time for him.

Alveda tells me authorities were surprised back then by the image of reverends who bucked the knee-jerk predicted response, and answered to a higher calling.

As she put it to me, "shaming the violent, to shame violence altogether."

Leave it to a woman whose family was scarred by violence, to reject violence.

I like to think such inherent decency doesn't end with the passing of a patriarch, but with the generations he leaves behind, and the futility such violence leaves behind as well.

That's why I hope and pray the best for Ferguson and those who will not be drawn into battles others might encourage but never fight themselves.

They say we are the product of our own inner rage some justified most not.

Yet now and then history proves we are sometimes summoned to a greater good.

And the sum of our greater parts.

The parts that bind us and not the parts that at any time -- black or white -- could undo us.