IN HONOR OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
Sometimes I think I have adult A.D.D. I can’t sit still very long & boring people about drive me to suicide. Long trips. Rush hour. Emotionless sermons. I can’t stand anything that makes me sit still longer than a few seconds unless it entertains me.
About five years ago, I went to a sales conference that could be categorized as an Alcatraz for ADDers. A middle-aged, well-dressed lady was the prison warden offering the normal torture tactics: false modesty, a monotone voice, overused cliché’s & a bevy of painfully boring stories. I remember drinking massive amounts of water just so I had an excuse to go to the bathroom.
As I drooled on my bottom lip & doodled on a hotel notepad, the ice-pick-my-the-eye boring speaker rambled through a series of irrelevant & over used metaphors about life. I think her goal was to irritate us into being better sales people.With my eyes flickering & attention almost gone, a life-changing quote splashed across the poorly assembled power point presentation.
In a real sense all life is inter-related. All persons are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny: Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, & you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the inter-related structure of reality.
When I first read Martin Luther King’s words, I thought I understood what he was saying about community. He was telling us to comprehend the connection of people around us. Those you see when you walk in a crowd, men of different opinions, races & religions. All the people of the world related together in a single garment of humanity.
I thought I understood, but my initial thought was superficial. It took me five more years to appreciate the expanded meaning of MLK’s discourse. Continued...