Snowed In

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath–
America will be!

That’s Langston Hughes, quoted in this speech of Martin Luther King Jr.’s.

I’ve got a post about my weekend queued up, waiting for me to add some photos. But right now I’m spending the last little bit of Martin Luther King day reading some of the things King said, and realizing how far I have to go in my quest to be a truly good global citizen, realizing how powerful his contribution was, given that it is still changing hearts today, and thinking about exactly what next step I must take to help the world get just a little closer to his ideal.

King won the Nobel Peace Prize at 35, and was killed at 39. Most days I ask myself, “what is holding me back from making a contribution to the world like that.” I don’t think it’s prideful to want to try, I think it’s the purpose of the human spirit. When King received the Peace Prize in 1964, he didn’t consider an award, he considered it a commission, “a commission to work harder than [he] had ever worked before for ‘the brotherhood of man.’”

There was a spark there; an unending desire to work until the job was done, continuing through failures, and continuing through successes. Many of us are happy to be good and do good within the context we were born. Being a good person–within your station in life, within your culture, within your habits, within your niche–a valuable contribution to the world. It’s something to feel good about.

But there are those who are not satisfied until a job is done, and aren’t satisfied pushing on the doors nearest to them. They climb out of thei niche and seek out a way to change the system, and work at it until it’s done. Those people should take comfort in King’s story. He showed us that we can find those places where they can cause the world to shift, where the great boulders of our culture can be moved.

And it gives me great comfort to know that there are people out there who can never stop working on King’s vision, searching stubbornly for a point of leverage uniquely suited to them, where they can shift the world his way.