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Greetings from Guam We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. - Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968), civil rights leader and clergyman I can not believe that the Confederate Flag is still flying atop the dome of the South Carolina Statehouse in Columbia! My God, the war has been over for over 134 years - 135 years this April 9th, and they are still clinging to that pathetic symbol of bigotry and hatred? The deep south still confounds me from time to time. About five or six years ago, I was driving from New York to Florida and pulled into one of those all night truck stops off of Interstate 95 in South Carolina to gas up. I bought some coffee and was perusing the fireworks when I noticed some hats for sale. Embroidered on the hats was the following: Help clean up the south - put a Yankee on a bus. I was kind of shocked and more or less just laughed it off as complete and total ignorance. Looking back now, I really wished I had said something to the clerk about the offensiveness of the hat. I know there will always be racism, hatred, and ignorance in this world, but the majority of us would rather just silently go about our own lives and let the racist spew his hate and the ignorant demonstrate his ignorance. We take the path of least resistance - the easy way out. And our silence only reinforces the hatred, racism, and ignorance displayed by others. Don't we owe it to Dr. King, Medgar Evers, Emmit Till, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and the hundreds of others who were killed in the great struggle of the civil rights movement to continue their fight? Racism and intolerance exists today precisely because of the 'appalling silence' of the good people - the vast majority of Americans. All of us run across people in our daily lives who make insensitive and ignorant remarks, either intentionally or not. Do we always stop to correct them or voice our moral objections to their remarks or actions? What if everyone of us did do just that? Would it make a difference? We will never know if we don't try. (I guess I am more or less asking myself these questions, because I know I could do better.) Think of it this way. What would America be like today if Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B.Wells, Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers, James Merideth, the Little Rock Nine, Rosa Parks, Dick Gregory, Julian Bond, Thurgood Marshall, Rev. Dr. Ralph Abernathy, and James Farmer, were never born? What might our daily lives be like? I can guarantee that America would not be the world's symbol for freedom and democracy. Would the Germans have been chanting 'We shall overcome' in 1989 as they torn down the Berlin Wall? Nine years after his death, Dr. King was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The citation on the medal reads in part: Martin Luther King Jr. was the conscience of his generation...He gazed on the great wall of segregation and saw that the power of love could bring it down...He helped us overcome our ignorance of one another...He made our nation stronger because he made it better...His life informed us, his dreams sustain us yet. Happy Birthday, Dr. King and thank you. Hafa Adai Copyright © 2000 |
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