A Conscience and Some Basketball

"We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, 
a society that can live with its conscience."

        (Martin Luther King, Jr. in Montgomery, Alabama, March 25, 1965)

My mom was pregnant with me when MLK, Jr. said these words. It was also my brother Morry's 10th birthday and my sister Ruth had just turned one the day before. There were five other children between Ruth and Morry, and three older ones. Two more would come after me.  

I think about the world we all came into in the fifties and sixties (the youngest being born in 1970), and the tumultuous but transformative times our nation was in. Progress was made and laws were passed. But many got complacent and others got greedy and power-hungry and we lost some of the humanity for which MLK, Jr. and so many others had worked so hard and peacefully.

My next thought with this quote was what if I said it this way "I must come to see that the end I seek is a woman at peace with herself, a woman that can live with her conscience." That can mean many things in the realms of my life, but in this context it means looking at my white privilege, my white silence, my implicit biases and blind spots, my own complacency when it comes to this work. 

And then this morning, this quote from Pema Chodron showed up as today's Word for the Day:  

"Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others."

This is where we are right now, in my opinion. And the reason why we seem to be losing ground when it comes to progress to end racism, misogyny, and other blights that hold us ALL back. We have become a finger-pointing and blaming society. When we want to slip back into apathy, we say it is "their fault or their problem" and we let ourselves off the hook. That doesn't work. It hinders. There is evidence everywhere now. 

I need to do my part and that includes looking at my shortcomings and the ways I have helped maintain racist systems and other structures that limit humanity. I need to point a finger at myself and do the work, Thankfully, others are doing the work and here to help me along the way. Please join us. Pick up a book. Have a conversation. Speak up when before you would have remained silent. 

And ending on a lighter note, here’s another humanity check in . . . Watching a bunch of 6- and 7-year- olds play some basketball . . . determined looks as they travel and double dribble and their surprise as a shot they took actually swooshes through the net. That is some entertaining humanity. Thank you to our grandson Leo and the others who showed us this bit of humanity last evening.