It is easy to be "invincible" in this world, autonomous of other people and their situations...until life decides to bring the perfect storm down on you. And when you are cast off and cast away, bobbing up and down in the waves you quickly realize that, to this world, you are not even tangible. You are sea foam at best, rudely deposited on the shore, baked by the sun until you are no more. But that is despair talking - the thought that encourages you to give up.
The truth lies somewhere in the middle, doesn’t it. You will never be invincible, but you can sure be immortal. You can do anything, everything...you just need others to help you do it. And coercion and hate and brutality can only take you as far as the cliff where you and your ideas will be found smashed to bits at its base.
But Love...ahh what love can do...
The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. said; "Somewhere somebody must have some sense. Men must see that force begets force, hate begets hate, toughness begets toughness. And it is all a descending spiral, ultimately ending in destruction for all and everybody. Somebody must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate and the chain of evil in the universe. And you do that by love."
I am the product of his lost legacy...but that is not all I am. I am also the promise of finding again his legacy. Dr. King's legacy was for African Americans, the poor, Disenfranchised Caucasian Americans who can't find a job, Latino Americans stuck in migrant work who do not 'habla Ingles', Asian Americans stifled creatively, Muslim Americans afraid to pray openly, Middle Class Americans afraid to look and Ghetto kids who have seen too much.
Ohh what Love could do...
Dr. King also said; ”People fail to get along because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don't know each other; they don't know each other because they have not communicated with each other."
If we could all have a few moments of each others time. I believe that if we really shared with each other, broke bread together, and camped next to one another the differences that force us apart would melt away like pouring water on the Wicked Witch. If we could only talk, really talk to one another, without prejudices and agendas...oh, what we could do.
We could be Heroes! We could change the world...like the blessed community that was the 1st century Church or
But we need to do something soon. You see our children are been ground up in a mill that devalues them, hunts them, hurts them then discards them. I am a by-product of this mill, as is every Homeless man, woman and child. And they will continue to be vast wastelands of wasted peoples RIGHT HERE IN AMERICA if we don't sit down and remember the Dream and live in it, and then teach our kids to live in that promise as well and teach their kids and so on and so on...
The Dream is Love itself. But as Langston Hughes wrote; "what happens to a dream deferred?"...What happens to it
Oh how Love could Heal...
this is the arrogance I wake up with, that I can do anything, everything...because I am Loved and if I spread that Love to you...maybe ...we can be Immortal in some young person's heart...Maybe, we can be heroes.
Like Dr. King...if we can just remember....
