A preacher friend of mine has embarked upon a mission. He wants to stop people in his city, Washington, D.C., from killing each other.

The minister has had his fill of the rat-a-tat of city violence, that grim rhythm of drive-by shootings, innocent bystanders, weeping mothers and caskets so small they break your heart. So he has embarked upon a crusade against … murder.

I’m a little fuzzy on how it’s supposed to work and I get the sense David’s still doping it out himself. As best I can tell, he’s crusading against killing with a combination of prayer, street preaching, advocacy, dispute mediation and moral suasion.

By these means, he hopes to make murder an unknown. In D.C., yet. And did I mention that he proposes to bring this about within three years?

You will not be surprised to hear that some people think the preacher is one chapter short of a complete Bible, if you catch my drift. I took him aside the other day and said, “I know people have been telling you you’re crazy.” He nodded.

“Well, they’re right,” I said. “You ARE crazy.”

Then I pointed out to him that Martin Luther King Jr. was crazy, too.

After all, he surveyed a system that had been enshrined in law and custom for nearly a century and decided that, without guns, with little money, with limited public support and with no weapon besides righteousness, he would bring it down.

We all know how that story came out.

It turns out that history is replete with the triumphs and achievements of crazy people. From George Washington defeating the mightiest military on earth with an army of farmers and tradesmen to Mohandas Gandhi waging peaceful war against the British empire to Berry Gordy igniting a cultural revolution with a $700 loan, there have always been those who were just crazy enough to confound expectation, overcome long odds and midwife change.

It strikes me that sometimes, crazy is a word we use for “can’t be done.” And “can’t be done” is, in turn, an expression that means “never tried to do it.” Or, worse, “learned to accept it the way it is.”

I don’t think David ever quite learned to accept. You hear it in his voice sometimes when he gets rolling in the pulpit. You sense that here is a man who never figured out how to put up the armor most of us wear on city streets, the emotional chain mail that allows us to walk without pain or pause past the bereft, the bereaved, the despicable and the despised.

There was once a time when more of us were like that, when more of us walked about unarmored. For all the excesses of the 1960s … and they were considerable … the one thing I admire about that era is that the people in it lived with a sense of the possible. A sense that the power to make change, both personal and systemic, resided within each and every one.

That sense, that optimism, has never again seemed quite so general. We have become more pragmatic in the intervening years. Accustomed ourselves to lowered expectations and diminished skies. At a time when technology reposes more power in the hands of the individual than ever before, we seem, paradoxically, to have lost faith in the power of one to move many.

David’s crusade is quixotic, to be sure. I don’t know if he will save a thousand lives, or one, or none. I do know that it’s exhilarating to watch him try.

That it awakens in me something that demands to know what crazy things I’ve done lately.

My answer is probably the same as yours: Too few.

I won’t bore you with my excuses if you don’t bore me with yours. Fact is, I see the same world the preacher sees. We ALL see the world the preacher sees.

Yet he toils in the name of change because he can’t just stand by and do nothing.

Meantime, we … many of us … sheathe our hearts in chain mail and pretend we don’t see what we do.

The preacher might be crazy, true. On the other hand, maybe we’re just not crazy enough.