Aidsand Wright-Riggins
Sometimes after I’ve read the morning newspaper or watched the evening news, I feel as though the world itself is on fire and swiftly burning down. When I grow a bit despondent and begin sinking toward despair, I think of a quote attributed to Edmund Burke in which he said “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good (people) to do nothing.” I believe that one of the things we can all do is to begin thinking of the world a bit differently.
For me, this is where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is very helpful. In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech sixty years ago (1964), King said: “Some years ago a famous novelist died. Among his papers was found a list of suggested story plots for future stories, the most prominently underscored being this one: ‘A widely separated family inherits a house in which they have to live together.’ This is the great new problem of mankind. We have inherited a big house, a great ‘world house’ in which we have to live together – black and white, Easterners and Westerners, Gentiles and Jews, Catholics and Protestants, Muslim and Hindu, a family unduly separated in ideas, culture and interests who, because we can never again live without each other, must learn somehow, in this one big world, to live with each other.”
Dr. King goes on to call us to: 1) transcend tribe, race, class, nation and religion to embrace the vision of a World House; 2) eradicate at home and globally the Triple Evils of racism, poverty and militarism; 3) curb excessive materialism and shift from a “thing” oriented society to a “people” oriented society; and 4) resist social injustice and resolve conflicts in the spirit of love embodied in the philosophy and methods of nonviolence. He advocates a Marshall Plan to eradicate global poverty, a living wage and a guaranteed minimum annual income for every American family. He urges the United Nations to experiment with the use of nonviolent direct action in international conflicts. The final paragraph warns of the “fierce urgency of now” and cautions that this may be the last chance to choose between chaos and community.
As for me, I choose community. I choose to think differently about our world. I choose to live in the fierce urgency of now. Will you?
