- Martin Luther King Jr. said once "I can't be what
I want to be until you are what you want to be".
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- If you think about it, a child is not born with bias-prejudice
and hatred towards certain races, cultures, or religions. The system to
which he or she is born into already has that prepared for them;as they
exit summer puddles, secret glens, swimming holes, fire fly nights, burnt
marshmallows, hay loft's romp, and screen doors bang.
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- My earlier years had us living in connected row houses
built for the men who worked in the mills down in the valley. One section
of this housing complex was set apart for Black citizens. They socialized,
had their picnics and play time separate. I asked "why?". No-one
answered. I heard my relatives in their crude gossip speak to their various
judgements of other's short comings, flaws, religion and race.
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- My grandma, they said, hated Italians, Blacks, and Protestants.
She also thought my autistic brother a curse, and demanded that an errant
daughter's child born out of wedlock be banished to an orphanage. My parents
went to the orphanage and took back the little girl called Eleanor that
was thrown away. She was the same age as my autistic brother, and covered
with boils from lack of care. My dad said that no child of our blood would
be thrown away. I remember when we would visit my grandma's house, the
place of holiday feasts, when these ignorant asses would turn their backs
when my brother and Eleanor entered the room. Such is how hatred and prejudice
is passed on from generation to generation.....if permitted. My parents
did not enter the realm of defending my brother's autism nor Eleanor's
birth to them. They explained later at home,that when people choose to
hate instead of love,they are beyond any words to reach their hardened
hearts and to remember that love doesn't need defending. Love is unconditional.
Harry was our bread man. Every week he would come in his tan uniform and
deliver several loaves of bread. Harry was a tall Black man with an infectious
laugh always smiling. Harry didn't mean to spend his days delivering bread
he was going to be a dancer. And so Harry would come into our small kitchen
with it's picnic table shoved aside and put on his tap dancing shoes and
do his thing on our cracked linoleum.
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- Eleanor died of a rare heart condition that runs in our
family. Jerry (my brother) died of abuse and neglect in an institution.
My grandma died but she changed her mind about hating Protestants when
her youngster daughter married a CEO of a large corporation. Money changes
hatred I learned or at least colors it differently. I remember the excitement
of coming home from Sunday school and going to my grandma's house. I told
her that the priest had told us that God was a Spirt and that we were all
made in the image of God. So, since spirit's have no color she didn't have
to hate anymore. She kept hating, except for my Protestant Uncle. My maid
of honor was Italian as where all the girls I trained with at the hospital.
The woman I admired most was Mrs. Blue a genteel Black woman from a housing
project. I read about a battle she was in and called her saying I thought
we were supposed to be friends. With busses not running on Sunday she couldn't
get to her church. So I became the only white member in this huge congregation.
At her death Reverend Perry gave me of all people the honor of delivering
her eulogy. Mrs. Blue, when she'd call me every night at home,speaking
to the various injustices in town,would always say, "Hmm hmm hmm Miss
Judy--the milk ain't clean".
Except for Harry the tap-dancing bread man and the Blacks who lived in
a separate section of the park,I wasn't aware of how venomous hatred could
be towards a race of people. Not until I came home from school one day
and there on the black and white TV were white people screaming and firemen
with hoses, and snarling dogs attacking Black people. I asked my dad why
they were doing that?He said they didn't want Black people to vote and
they didn't want Black children in their schools and so they attacked them.
He told me about the KKK and the terrible things that were done in the
night to Black families. I went to our town library to get some books on
the KKK but that row was completely empty. Somebody had stolen all the
books.
The President was shot, his brother was shot,and Reverend Martin Luther
King was shot. It was then that my generation learned that men of charisma,
of leadership qualities, who connected with the hearts of the people had
to be killed. Nobody ever believed the stories of lone deranged madmen
doing them in. Nobody. Such men, (leaders) despite their imperfections
were loved by the people. Maybe it was because they were flawed and never
pretended perfection that they were loved.
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- Dr.King became a threat with his I Have A Dream. Dr.King
became a threat when he saw the insanity and expenditures of war and the
costs to humanity. Dr. King became a threat when he saw the Black man and
White man, the Red man and Yellow man as a mosaic;that when seen woven
together in their gifts and talents, their song and praise,were the true
beauty of a nation. Dr.King saw the worth of a man in whatever job he held.
When he was felled by an assassin's bullet on April 4, 1968, he was in
Memphis, Tenn, lending support to striking sanitation workers. He said,
"So often we overlook the work and significance of those who are not
in professional jobs, of those who are not the so-called big jobs. But
let me say to you tonight that whenever you are engaged in work that serves
humanity and it is for the building of humanity, it has dignity and it
has worth." He told people they were important. He made them feel
needed.
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- He was against violence and against the money making
of war's machine and perhaps that's what did him in. Money's plots and
plans for the poor were to be cannon fodder to fill rich men's coffers
in unending war.Black ghetto youth and poor White rural youth and immigrant
youth. The dream of madmen has youth killing and destroying,not joying
together and building a nation. He said, "If our nation can spend
35 billion dollars a year (now close to 200 billion-04) to fight an unjust,
evil war in Vietnam, and 20 billion dollars a year to put a man on the
moon, it can spend billions of dollars to put God's children on their own
two feet right here on earth".
Freedom? Dr.King would not have black and white children taking up weapons
to kill strangers of other lands calling it "liberation". Like
love-freedom does not need liberated. It just is. One can hardly join hands
when those hands hold weapons to destroy another to guide a bomb from distant
heavens to shred people below. Freedom? Dr. King's dream did not see a
global plantation where the few would through fear, threat, imprisonment,
shredding and melting,enslave the multitudes and rob them of their children,
lands, minerals and water. Perversion has turned the dream of Dr. King
into a nightmare.
Arab and Hindu, Black, Yellow, White, Jew and Palestinian, Native American
Indians and tropical rain forest peoples; we are all merely the color and
song of a great tapestry against the turquoise background of a small planet
in the vastness of space. Each magnificent in their cultures, lands, temples,
worship and environments. From the starkness of desert lands with their
nomadic tribes, to Brazilian rain forest people and stunted growth on high
mountains peaks we are here to compliment one another not to conquer.
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- I Am. "I Am A Man" are the placards that the
sanitation workers wore that day long ago in Memphis. I am the gift of
the farmer, the fisherman, the truck driver, the plumber, the postman,
the teacher, the construction man, the fireman, the policeman, the shop
keeper, the craftsman, the poet, the artist, the musician, the shepherd,
the camel driver, the weaver, the baker, the dancer, the foundry worker,
the miner, the preacher, the storyteller, the bricklayer, the architect,
the broker, the conductor, the bus driver, the social worker, the activist,
the scientist and the sculptor. I am woman-I am man-pilgrims but for a
short stay. I am meant to create-to dream-to sing-to plant-to praise-not
to plunder, maim, and destroy. I am!
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- "The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands
in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of
challenge and controversy"
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- "Cowardice asks the question: Is it safe? Expediency
asks the question: Is it politic? Vanity asks the question-Is it popular?
But conscience asks the question: Is it right? And there comes a time when
one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular;
but one must take because it is right. When you are right, you cannot be
too radical; when you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative. The good
neighbor looks beyond the external accidents and discerns those inner qualities
that make all men humans and therefore, brothers."
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- You may kill a man but not his dream. "Say that
I was a drum major for justice; say that I was a drum major for peace.
No individual can live alone; no nation can live alone, and as long as
we try, the more we are going to have war in this world."
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