By Kim Rosenberg
“When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it–always.”
Mahatma Gandhi
“Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”
Martin Luther King Jr.
People show you who they are by their actions and by the words they choose. Pretend someone doesn’t mean what they say or what they do and live to find out otherwise. As long as the words and actions are pointed at other people, you’ll be fine. Pretend that the handful of millionaires and billionaires who are in power aren’t using their power to benefit themselves while maintaining control of the world’s resources. They accrue their wealth by standing on the backs of those who are without wealth, without power and without a voice. And we let them do it because we bought the lie they sold us—that our differences are something to be feared and hated.
Sometimes we ignore the differences between us because we’re afraid of saying the wrong thing. We are fearful and suspicious of differences when we don’t know people who aren’t like us. We allow those differences to separate us from each other and we lose a powerful force for change. Community.
As William Stafford wrote in his poem, A Ritual to Read to Each Other:
“If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star….
For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.”
On this MLK day I want to paraphrase director David Lynch, let’s keep our eyes on the donut, kids not on the hole.
Posting on behalf of Kim Rosenberg
loretta.kim.rosenberg@gmail.com