I have so many different random thoughts so please forgive me for how this jumps around. As those who actively follow what I write about on the old internet, youll know this is the one topic I bother to spend any amount of significant time on... Today is a day to look at our past, to appreciate those who came before us and acted as catalysts for change. Martin Luther King Jr rightly receives this day every year where so many sit and reflect upon the world he lived in and the change he wrought. Im always happy to see the so many social networks usually filled with the frivolous shining a light on an important part of our past. A history that is not too distant from a present day that has not fully accomplished the dream we so oft quote. We have so much left to do to realize this dream. This isnt about seeing everyone as the same. This is about seeing everyones differences and celebrating them. It is about looking at what has happened before and making sure it wont happen again. It is about creating a world around us where there is no “other”. From people, to animals, to the earth; we are all just living beings with a finite amount of time in the sun. Why continue to waste our short lives on death and destruction, it only speeds up the process for everything. There is no us, there is no them. Any one of us could have ended up in anyones shoes. Why perpetuate a hierarchy built upon chance? Several years ago there was an NPR program on the darnedest things children say. As you could imagine, this all started in silliness. One of the last parts of the program was a tragic realization. A little girl asks her dad about Jesus after attending church. Her dad tells her all about his message of love and peace. She sees him on the cross and asks why. Her dad explains that people were frightened of this message and he died for the sake of everyone else. Several months later it was MLK day at school and the daughter asks who this man was. Once again her father explains that Martin Luther King Jr was a man with a message of peace and love, that all people should treat one another well. The most heartbreaking truth comes from this little girl. “Did they kill him too?” It is a sad world we live in where a child can equate such peace and love with death. That any person who fights for unity ends up a martyr. Its the sort of feeling you choke on until you cant help but cry. What is this world. In the ever wise words of Bob Marley, how long will they kill our prophets while we stand aside and look? This is our history and weve yet to fully learn from it. Im always sure to take a portion of this day to listen to a few speeches. Martin Luther King Jr. remains one of the most moving speakers Ive ever heard. The one I was listening to earlier he speaks of racism as a corrosive evil. The societies of the past that have fallen dont collapse from external pressures but internal decay. Racism is the rot destroying America and the world. So focused on power “we end up with guided missiles and misguided men.” That phrase speaks so much to the state of this world. So, focused on the grandeur we lose focus of individuals. As we see in the justice system. We are so focused on this caricature of what society thinks a bad person is that we are missing the true evils. We arent so glib we dont recognize this on some level. We are becoming more vocal, more aware, but it isnt enough. As long as people continue to raise their children with this skewed view, we will not overcome. We need to breed societies with less hate. Depressed at the state of things, lately Ive gotten into the mindset that the only solution is to wipe the slate clean. We need to reset, get rid of the minds that cultivate intolerance for their own greed. Listening to the speeches today it struck me how wrong that mindset is. Going to these extremes is what landed us in this situation in the first place. We cannot expect utopia if it is born of hate. Even the smallest amount of hate festers away, slowly spreading its decay throughout the soul. This goes beyond race. This goes beyond class. This goes beyond any category we create. This is about looking at our peers knowing that they can look at us. Knowing that behind the facade built by genetics is a mind taking in all of this data, attempting to process it, trying to make sense of everything. We arent going to agree on everything, but we should accept that we are not better. Not in any real sense. Humanity, just as art, is subjective. We all run into people we dont like, people we dont understand, people we dont want to have anything to do with. That wont change. It is too ingrained in our natures. We do have the power to change what we do with these feelings. It often feels like we have days set aside for these thoughts. Periods of time designated to voice these things. Makes me think of 1984. Two minutes of hate in our warped reality is two minutes of speaking up, saying the things that really matter. This needs to go beyond these time frames and spaces. We need to speak about this until it is resolved, not just on designated days or times of tragedy. This is a constant struggle. Change is agonizingly slow. Consistency as a whole will speed it up. If every day contains a conversation, a discussion, even just a thought concerning the problems, we can change the perception. Those people stuck in a world that creates these misconceptions might begin to see another side. We could create communities that dont use fear and hate to petrify us into a controlled regime. We can create a world of people acting out of good, not reacting to the negative. Today we spend on the past. We look at the terrible things that have happened. We look at those brave figures who stood up to make this world better. We see how a message of peace impacted the world we live in. Tomorrow we have to forget the past. Forget us and them, forget some idea of an enemy, forget the default of approaching each conflict with more wrath. We need to make some semblance of an effort at true unity. If we still look at others as our enemies, theyll continue to be so. The world is imperfect. It never will be anything but that. Still, I can hope to one day live in a world where we do not judge people for some quality that boxes them into a category. As a man much more intelligent and eloquent than me said, I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
Posted on: Tue, 20 Jan 2015 00:32:21 +0000
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