Make a Difference, Regardless of How Tiny
Frequent commenter Cameron Atwood writes:
I’m not sure if you saw this speech by MLK referenced in Chris Hedges’ recent piece, but here’s a link, and it seems as applicable in the present day as it was 44 years ago.
To which I respond:
Chris Hedges is one of the most brilliant minds in our world today. And by any standards, MLK was a supremely enlightened guy. Was he in Socrates’ league? I don’t know, but as time passes, it becomes ever clearer that the world is forever a better place because he was here.
To whatever minuscule degree, I wish to die believing the same about my own presence here. And as an off-the-charts coincidence, I came across this quote twice in the last 24 hours:
“Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”
– Horace Mann, address at Antioch College, 1859
That’s a fairly cool standard to which to hold oneself, don’t you think?
I firmly agree with that sentiment, Craig, and I find within myself an immense appreciation for the wisdom of King’s words.
Concerning our time, and our variously vexing circumstances – whether our nation’s lethally counterproductive misadventures abroad, or the ravenous corruption and the craven servility that for far too long have snaked through our statehouses and poisoned and pocketed our leadership – the passages from that speech seeming to me to be among the most directly applicable and important are these:
“Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.”
“I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.”
“We must continue to raise our voices and our lives if our nation persists in its perverse ways… …We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative method of protest possible.”
“These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.”
“Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken: the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
“We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood — it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, “Too late.””
If only hatred had not so early struck him down, what more we might have learned of that great mind.
With our feverish dependence today upon ancient sunlight from beneath foreign lands…
With the birth and exercise of the doctrines of “pre-emptive war” and “extrajudicial killings” – and the clumsy brutality we now inflict across the world with ever greater technical prowess…
With the rise and the insidious infestation of the lie of “corporate personhood”…
With the amoebic coagulation of investment firms, deposit banks, and insurance companies that were so firmly partitioned after the Great Depression…
With the hidden tendrils and tentacles of “securitized debt instruments” (against which the sellers themselves have placed bets) still lacing erosively through globe’s economic bedrock…
With the blind creed of short-term profit now dominant as the sole measure against which all must be held…
…We stand now upon a house of cards beneath which the ground increasingly trembles. We must quickly and carefully climb down and deal ourselves a new hand in a wiser game.
We cannot afford to let the chips fall where they may. The stakes are far too high.