The best way to honor a mentor is to practice what they taught you. It’s the application of the message that validates their work, not the affirmation or lionization they might attract. Their contribution to us all lies in what they taught and worked for during their lives, not in how we reinterpret them after […]
Being connected means… being connected.
One of my favorite concepts from Martin Luther King’s last few years is the concept of interdependence. King wrote and spoke about it in both his letter from Birmingham’s city jail (1963) and the Christmas sermon he delivered to Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta in 1967. In the Birmingham letter he responded to criticisms of his multi-state activism. “We are caught in […]
Interdependence Day
Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly… Before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you’re dependent on more than half the world. This is the way our universe is structured, this is its interrelated quality. We aren’t going to have peace on Earth until we recognize the basic fact of the interrelated structure of […]
The Movement Moment: Change, Denial, and the Fall of Empire
A director at one of the organizations I support recently asked me what I thought “the movement moment” was. What’s the spirit of this time? What’s rising up? The movement, I said, is life. The system demands we assimilate, and teaches us resistance is futile. The movement is not about the right to assimilate. The system calls […]
The Change We Want Is Not Inevitable
Today, several US states have observed Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. The annual commemoration usually means anodyne reflections on love driving out hate, a corporate-friendly and mostly un-challenging King, and wholesale disregard of the fact that he died only because his countrymen and government considered him a threat. But hashtags like #MLKAlsoSaid and #ReclaimMLK are […]
Transcript: Realism and Nonviolence
In May 1967, NBC reporter Sander Vanocur conducted a candid interview with Martin Luther King, Jr., about the 1963 March on Washington, the civil rights movement, and the impromptu “I have a dream” segment that became an iconic part of the 20th Century’s soundtrack. Today, King’s 1963 speech is remembered and replayed as a testament […]