As the nation celebrated the 81st Birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., it is clear that for some people, the legacy of King perhaps reached its climax with the election of President Barack Obama. However for people like myself, the legacy of King only reached yet another pivotal moment with the election of Obama and that the climax of King’s legacy has yet to be reached. King’s legacy is not for debate but what is up for debate is the service of action in King’s legacy in the eyes of us the people and how much we have lived up to King’s service action orientated legacy.
Therefore, it is time for us as people to understand that King’s legacy and the climax of it has not been reached. King said, “A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.” So with that said, some might say that leader is President Obama but I say King wasn’t speaking of a politician but he was speaking of us as people to lead our families and communities by molding them to stop being divided but working on what we all can agree on and build off of that consensus in the hopes that it pulls them closer to solving other issues.
King said, “A lie cannot live.” Well he’s right, we must defeat lies and we must admit the lies we have told to others in our lives in the hopes of putting it out there in the universe in order to start telling the truth and healing our own souls of the demonic demons that latch on to us to pull us down. Still King’s legacy is far greater than perhaps any of us can understand but the embodiment of it is, “A man who won't die for something is not fit to live.” Therefore what are you living, what are we living for. We all should be living not for self but for the service of others and to make this world better than how we found it.
It doesn’t matter if you are a Democrat, Independent, Republican, or if you belong to any other political party in this nation, the reality is that we all have a job to do which is to uplift, encourage and give hope to those of us who are sick, in despair and in need of help. As Dr. King said, “A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan.” Therefore, we all need to invest in the young Generation of Americans in order to help them become more educated than previous generations as well as to make them stronger to take the criticisms that might be thrown their way. We all have an obligation to make our minds strong and hard to withstand nonsense and b***s*** that won’t amount to anything than dragging someone down.
Still it is not enough that we invest in our youth but us as a people must make sure our nation and other nations are investing in the empowerment of the people rather than the empowerment of military defense. “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom,” said Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. If we as a society are investing more in military defense than social uplift than we are already dooming ourselves according to King and we can just look at America to see how bad things really in terms of social uplift. Just look at the fact we are at war in two nations and are spending nearly $800 billion per year on the wars.
Dr. Benjamin Jealous, the national President of the NAACP recently wrote, “Much of Dr. King's work was to end the scourge of poverty and he began to question the essence of our prevailing economic system. "We must ask the question why there are forty million poor people in America. And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy."” Therefore it is clear that much of King’s social action legacy still must be worked on. During King’s lifetime, Dr. King spoke of nearly 40 million Americans being poor, living in poverty or living near the poverty line meaning one paycheck away from poverty. Now if we look at those numbers today 39.2 million Americans still are living in poverty. Thus the greed and excesses of our system has led to one of the worst recessions in history no matter how anyone tries to look at it.
Dr. King was not just about civil rights but he was about equality and justice for all as well social-economic issues. King championed labor describing the labor movement as the "principal force that transformed misery and despair into hope and progress. When in the thirties the wave of union organization crested over our nation, it carried to secure shores not only itself but the whole society," he said. Today, the laws on union organizing have been weakened and the percentage of unionized workers has fallen from 36 percent in 1945 to 12.4 percent of American workers, only 7.6 percent in the private sector.
And Dr. King asked us all to give of our time and our voice to change the injustice around us. "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter," King said. Therefore King devoted his entire life to the rights of people and making sure people got the rights that they deserved because King believed, “A right delayed is a right denied.” So think about today and the rights of our neighbors, our friends and our family and ask ourselves are their rights of equality and justice being denied in any way and if so than we need to work on their behalf to stop the delay of those rights.
Most of all we all must remember, “All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence,” said Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Therefore the time we invest in the social action movement and progression of uplifting the lives of others will not come easy but the rewards will come with true excellence in doing what is right. When is doing what is right ever too late? When is it ever too late to do the right thing? If we as a people remember that than we will always do the right thing even after we have done something wrong. We must do the right thing because it is never too late to do the right thing.
At the same time, we must be patient in what we do to serve others. “Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle,” said King. We as people must be consistent in our acts of service and we must not be discouraged when the results of our actions are slow to come because the results of our hard work and commitment to serving others will pay off in all due time. King’s legacy is one that lives in each and every one of us but it is up to us to live up the potential of that legacy. Are we as people going to continue to live darkness or are we going to come into the light to live up to our own potential of greatness and the potential to help King’s legacy occur.
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that,” said Dr. King. So are we going show love to others so that we can lead humanity out of the darkness of hate that only tears down our society from the very foundations that we live on. Are we as people going to live in the light of love and showcase each and every day even if we know the world around us is going to pieces with the darkness of hate. Well King said, “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.” So if King could understand this nearly 40 plus years ago than why can’t we. “Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness,” said King. Are we as a people going to walk in the light or in the darkness? This is ultimately the decision we face today.
The decision we face today is to be great by serving others because greatness is accomplished when we give more of ourselves to make the lives of others better. Dr. King said, “Everybody can be great... because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.” Our greatness is right here for us to take and live up. The ability to live up to the greatness of the legacy of King is one that we all can accomplish but we must want it.
“Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see,” said Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. So now is the time to fully understand that all of which we see before us today didn’t happen by chance or circumstance but they happened because all the signs pointed to it happening but many of us just didn’t follow the signs to realize it. We as a people can be great but it begins with faith because as King said, “Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase.” Do we as a people have faith to take the first step even when we don’t see the whole staircase and do we have the faith to know that what we are working toward will happen because we have begun the process to accomplish it?
Are we as a people willing to make sure to release love into the atmosphere in order to defeat hate which only kills life. “Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it,” said King. Love is just that powerful that it can overcome anything that hate does but we as people must overcome our hatred for people and things. We as a society must exhibit love no matter what because King said, “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.” This is why we can’t participate in hate and we must not exhibit hate because by doing it, we are just as guilty as those who do hateful acts especially if we don’t fight against hatred.
King said it best when he said, “History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.” We are all good people but when we do bad things, we are considered bad; however we make redeem ourselves for our bad by not being silent in the face of injustices done to others. Dr. King said, “Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable... Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.” So will we give more of us tin order to continue the progression of humanity or will we sit by and do nothing as so many others have done throughout our history.
King’s legacy is about social action not just against injustice and for equality but for the salvation of humanity to live amongst each other peacefully. King said, “Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.” So are we adjusting our life styles to help those who are less fortunate than us and who are underprivileged. We as people must be selfless and while some of us might crave power, we must not crave power that is immoral. “I am not interested in power for power's sake, but I'm interested in power that is moral, that is right and that is good,” said Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. This is the only type of power that we all should be interested in but it must be in a selfless power that is moral, that is right and that is good because that is the only power that will benefit all of society.
King believed that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant. King understood that while the right thing can be temporarily defeated, it cannot be defeated forever. We as people must understand that when we do the right thing we can never be defeated and that we must always strive to do the right thing no matter how tempting evil might seem. We as a society must understand that an injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere as King believed because if an injustice takes place in Alaska, Maine, New York, Alabama, Michigan or California, we as a people must fight against it. An injustice anywhere can lead to the downfall of our society and if we don’t fight for it today than when will we fight against it.
King also went on to say, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” This is why we must always believe that what we are doing today will affect future generations and what future generations do, will affect another generation of people. Nothing we do as a people will just affect us or those around us because everything that we do will have a direct or indirect affect on this world.
“In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends,” said Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. So with that said, we must act now to change the fate of our nation and this world we live up. If you were silent on the social issues that plague the young, the sick, the elderly, the underprivileged and the poor prior to this year than now is the time to speak up. If you were silent on any of the social issues that don’t allow for equality and justice for all than now is the time to speak up and be heard. This is the moment for all of us to King because “I Am King, You Are King, and We are All King!” We just have to live up to the legacy now more than ever before.
Therefore, it is time for us as people to understand that King’s legacy and the climax of it has not been reached. King said, “A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.” So with that said, some might say that leader is President Obama but I say King wasn’t speaking of a politician but he was speaking of us as people to lead our families and communities by molding them to stop being divided but working on what we all can agree on and build off of that consensus in the hopes that it pulls them closer to solving other issues.
King said, “A lie cannot live.” Well he’s right, we must defeat lies and we must admit the lies we have told to others in our lives in the hopes of putting it out there in the universe in order to start telling the truth and healing our own souls of the demonic demons that latch on to us to pull us down. Still King’s legacy is far greater than perhaps any of us can understand but the embodiment of it is, “A man who won't die for something is not fit to live.” Therefore what are you living, what are we living for. We all should be living not for self but for the service of others and to make this world better than how we found it.
It doesn’t matter if you are a Democrat, Independent, Republican, or if you belong to any other political party in this nation, the reality is that we all have a job to do which is to uplift, encourage and give hope to those of us who are sick, in despair and in need of help. As Dr. King said, “A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan.” Therefore, we all need to invest in the young Generation of Americans in order to help them become more educated than previous generations as well as to make them stronger to take the criticisms that might be thrown their way. We all have an obligation to make our minds strong and hard to withstand nonsense and b***s*** that won’t amount to anything than dragging someone down.
Still it is not enough that we invest in our youth but us as a people must make sure our nation and other nations are investing in the empowerment of the people rather than the empowerment of military defense. “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom,” said Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. If we as a society are investing more in military defense than social uplift than we are already dooming ourselves according to King and we can just look at America to see how bad things really in terms of social uplift. Just look at the fact we are at war in two nations and are spending nearly $800 billion per year on the wars.
Dr. Benjamin Jealous, the national President of the NAACP recently wrote, “Much of Dr. King's work was to end the scourge of poverty and he began to question the essence of our prevailing economic system. "We must ask the question why there are forty million poor people in America. And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy."” Therefore it is clear that much of King’s social action legacy still must be worked on. During King’s lifetime, Dr. King spoke of nearly 40 million Americans being poor, living in poverty or living near the poverty line meaning one paycheck away from poverty. Now if we look at those numbers today 39.2 million Americans still are living in poverty. Thus the greed and excesses of our system has led to one of the worst recessions in history no matter how anyone tries to look at it.
Dr. King was not just about civil rights but he was about equality and justice for all as well social-economic issues. King championed labor describing the labor movement as the "principal force that transformed misery and despair into hope and progress. When in the thirties the wave of union organization crested over our nation, it carried to secure shores not only itself but the whole society," he said. Today, the laws on union organizing have been weakened and the percentage of unionized workers has fallen from 36 percent in 1945 to 12.4 percent of American workers, only 7.6 percent in the private sector.
And Dr. King asked us all to give of our time and our voice to change the injustice around us. "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter," King said. Therefore King devoted his entire life to the rights of people and making sure people got the rights that they deserved because King believed, “A right delayed is a right denied.” So think about today and the rights of our neighbors, our friends and our family and ask ourselves are their rights of equality and justice being denied in any way and if so than we need to work on their behalf to stop the delay of those rights.
Most of all we all must remember, “All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence,” said Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Therefore the time we invest in the social action movement and progression of uplifting the lives of others will not come easy but the rewards will come with true excellence in doing what is right. When is doing what is right ever too late? When is it ever too late to do the right thing? If we as a people remember that than we will always do the right thing even after we have done something wrong. We must do the right thing because it is never too late to do the right thing.
At the same time, we must be patient in what we do to serve others. “Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle,” said King. We as people must be consistent in our acts of service and we must not be discouraged when the results of our actions are slow to come because the results of our hard work and commitment to serving others will pay off in all due time. King’s legacy is one that lives in each and every one of us but it is up to us to live up the potential of that legacy. Are we as people going to continue to live darkness or are we going to come into the light to live up to our own potential of greatness and the potential to help King’s legacy occur.
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that,” said Dr. King. So are we going show love to others so that we can lead humanity out of the darkness of hate that only tears down our society from the very foundations that we live on. Are we as people going to live in the light of love and showcase each and every day even if we know the world around us is going to pieces with the darkness of hate. Well King said, “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.” So if King could understand this nearly 40 plus years ago than why can’t we. “Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness,” said King. Are we as a people going to walk in the light or in the darkness? This is ultimately the decision we face today.
The decision we face today is to be great by serving others because greatness is accomplished when we give more of ourselves to make the lives of others better. Dr. King said, “Everybody can be great... because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.” Our greatness is right here for us to take and live up. The ability to live up to the greatness of the legacy of King is one that we all can accomplish but we must want it.
“Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see,” said Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. So now is the time to fully understand that all of which we see before us today didn’t happen by chance or circumstance but they happened because all the signs pointed to it happening but many of us just didn’t follow the signs to realize it. We as a people can be great but it begins with faith because as King said, “Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase.” Do we as a people have faith to take the first step even when we don’t see the whole staircase and do we have the faith to know that what we are working toward will happen because we have begun the process to accomplish it?
Are we as a people willing to make sure to release love into the atmosphere in order to defeat hate which only kills life. “Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it,” said King. Love is just that powerful that it can overcome anything that hate does but we as people must overcome our hatred for people and things. We as a society must exhibit love no matter what because King said, “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.” This is why we can’t participate in hate and we must not exhibit hate because by doing it, we are just as guilty as those who do hateful acts especially if we don’t fight against hatred.
King said it best when he said, “History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.” We are all good people but when we do bad things, we are considered bad; however we make redeem ourselves for our bad by not being silent in the face of injustices done to others. Dr. King said, “Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable... Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.” So will we give more of us tin order to continue the progression of humanity or will we sit by and do nothing as so many others have done throughout our history.
King’s legacy is about social action not just against injustice and for equality but for the salvation of humanity to live amongst each other peacefully. King said, “Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.” So are we adjusting our life styles to help those who are less fortunate than us and who are underprivileged. We as people must be selfless and while some of us might crave power, we must not crave power that is immoral. “I am not interested in power for power's sake, but I'm interested in power that is moral, that is right and that is good,” said Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. This is the only type of power that we all should be interested in but it must be in a selfless power that is moral, that is right and that is good because that is the only power that will benefit all of society.
King believed that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant. King understood that while the right thing can be temporarily defeated, it cannot be defeated forever. We as people must understand that when we do the right thing we can never be defeated and that we must always strive to do the right thing no matter how tempting evil might seem. We as a society must understand that an injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere as King believed because if an injustice takes place in Alaska, Maine, New York, Alabama, Michigan or California, we as a people must fight against it. An injustice anywhere can lead to the downfall of our society and if we don’t fight for it today than when will we fight against it.
King also went on to say, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” This is why we must always believe that what we are doing today will affect future generations and what future generations do, will affect another generation of people. Nothing we do as a people will just affect us or those around us because everything that we do will have a direct or indirect affect on this world.
“In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends,” said Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. So with that said, we must act now to change the fate of our nation and this world we live up. If you were silent on the social issues that plague the young, the sick, the elderly, the underprivileged and the poor prior to this year than now is the time to speak up. If you were silent on any of the social issues that don’t allow for equality and justice for all than now is the time to speak up and be heard. This is the moment for all of us to King because “I Am King, You Are King, and We are All King!” We just have to live up to the legacy now more than ever before.
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