There’s lots of people saying lots of good things today, or posting great quotes at least. Let’s choose to live them out, though. Let’s teach them to our kids by both our actions and our words, but especially by our actions. Quotes don’t do a lot in and of themselves. MLK’s dream is being actively challenged in our country these days. We are in the midst of a great social recession. People attack the Capitol and then lie about why. The truth doesn’t seem to mean much. They don’t even know how to dream. They use that energy and imagination to conspire and to blame.
What a bunch of cowards.
We can’t sit idly by and expect things to get better in this country when people are working hard to make them worse for others. The “American Dream” is not the dream Martin Luther King Jr. dreamt about.
But good on us for not judging others by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. I wish we were better at judging the content of our own character first, though. It doesn’t seem like we are very good at that. (And we aren’t actually good about it with others, either).
It’s hard to have hope. It’s difficult to keep the faith. Joy can be elusive. And love, I’m not sure we really even know what that is as a society. But it’s what we need. We need love. We need patience and compassion. But we won’t have it until we are honest first. We need to remember that honesty matters. The truth, it matters.
King said, “The day we see the truth and cease to speak is the day we begin to die.”
We aren’t even looking for the truth anymore, let alone speaking it. We are killing ourselves. We are killing each other. We are successfully ripping this country apart.
For what purpose?
We need to be getting into some good trouble. We can’t forget the legacy of the courage to speak the truth by those in this country who were willing to be beaten and killed for the love of their neighbor and the people of this country.
The truth matters. Black lives matter.
Let’s live like it.
Stepping Back 