Reflecting on sacrifice
My nephew posted this on his Facebook wall this morning:
We all have dreams, but how much are you willing to sacrifice to realize yours? Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day
Indeed. Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
Martin Luther King Jr died at 39. And he predicted his own death. On the eve of his assassination he said, in an eerily prescient passage:
Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land.
Taylor Branch, the historian who wrote a trilogy of books on the life of King, said in the PBS show, Citizen King,
The Movement took a huge toll on him. When they did the autopsy, they said he had the heart of a 60 year old, he’s 39. So yes, it took a big toll on him, and he was constantly fantasizing about getting out of the Movement
Martin Luther King Jr.’s early death, while tragic, is not atypical for an African American man living in America. African American men have a life expectancy of 66.1 years, compared to the national average of 73.6 years. And homicide is the 5th leading cause of death for African Americans in the U.S. according to the CDC. This morning NPR’s Fresh Air hosts legal scholar Michelle Alexander who writes in her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness that thanks to the war on drugs, there are more African-Americans in the criminal justice system – in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.
So, when I think about sacrifices, I think not just about what we want to sacrifice, but the sacrifices our society imposes on others, the sacrifice of education, access to health care, opportunity, and of a future. What and who are we sacrificing as a society? And one last note on sacrifice. Death tends to ennoble a thing. Let’s not forget that Martin Luther King Jr was also hated and despised in his life time. As Oscar Wilde said: “A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.”
Ok, I’ll be the first to reply. I must alert you, I just came back from a heavy family scene, so naturally that is influencing what I am about to write. While I fully understand the statement, “a thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.” In the case of Dr. Martin L. King, I hope you are not implying that. As I am watching my parents lives winding down and the next generation of the grand kids and the sad legacy of family members not waking up and integrating the many aspects of being human, calls for. As I know the pain personally, and now hear of the pain being continued, I would respond to that last sentence from the opposite position. There is so much that a person is willing to stand in the truth of, inspite of how others contine to be in denial and that takes so much bravery. It can be painfully lonely and it can and does wear you down. I wonder if the resistance to change is so F’n strong that we have lost the spirit to make the sacrafice to awaken. And that you not only see that in the microcosm of a family/my family but the larger family of our time? What I observe is an incredible selfishness that we as a world are confronting and the stamina to push against that seems to have lost some steam. What do you think?
Mary
Ok, I’m reply again. Is it that we lack the stamina to “feel” the truth/discomfort of lifes difficulties?
M