2nd Hand Advice

Today is January 17, 2011, the 82^nd birthday of Martin Luther King Jr.  This day we celebrate is a national holiday, where we stop and remember the great man he was.  Forty three years after his death, we are still reminded of how great he was and the transformative impact he had on society.  I can’t think of another person, and certainly no other with whom we have honored with a national holiday, that has caused a nation to really look at itself and ask: is this the best we can do?

We are a great nation with a proud history, but one that is also painful.  The pain of our collective existence through the years from slavery through the civil rights movement through to the most pressing social ills of today, has co-existed alongside great accomplishments and achievement.  From the founding of our nation, to the building of our great institutions, to the progression into a society that has seen amazing technological advances, we have somehow continued to work together day in and day out to try to perfect this place we call America.

This pain reminds us our progress did not come easy and the work ahead seems ever the more challenging.  In the 1960’s, in the middle of perhaps one of the ugliest periods in recent memory for our country, we learned that the promises, dreams and hopes that were ours whether by birthright, by law, or by divine right, could be denied and they were.  We learned they could be surpressed and they were.  We learned they could be taken away and they were.  But it took one man, the truth that all men are created equal, and the ideal that we could use love and non-violence as a unifying force, to awakened the moral consciousness of a nation to do the right thing and remember why it existed. 

For African Americans, one of the fundamental lessons of this part of our history, which Dr. King taught us through word and action, was that no progress comes by itself.  Justice did not happen by itself.  We had to take charge of our God given destiny, and attack the work that needed to be done to continue perfecting the promise of America. For all Americans, that work and call for action still resonates on this day. We must hunker down on the most pressing issues of the day, whether it’s striving for higher levels of racial reconciliation, transforming men and women who are incarcerated, eliminating poverty, eradicating fatherlessness, educating the un-educated, or ensuring growth and opportunity for every child in America.  All of these require our best, most focused, energetic, and enthusiastic participation. 

Dr. King also taught us that we cannot become great unless we become great together.  That will be our greatest challenge.  To find that place where we are all able to put aside ideology, anger, our differences, and find common purpose in creating a society in which it is impossible to tolerate pain, suffering, and dysfunction.  That is Dr. King’s continuing legacy to us: not just in what he did, but what he taught us about ourselves and what we can become.

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