Beliefs
Mitch Washburn
Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream. A fundamental principle he believed to be
true and is not considered, without a doubt, one of the most influential
figures in American history. But do we risk repeating past mistakes if we place
MLK on a pedestal? History is doomed for repetition if we do not remember the
past, however unpleasant. I read Martin Luther King’s “Letter From a Birmingham
Jail” and interpreted it to be a cry of knowledge. King thoroughly stakes his
claim that when he was acting was indeed the right time. He also ties in
arguments that play to one’s common sense; if there were and unjust law, you
should break it. In the assembly, the keynote speaker was Dr. J. Cameron
Carter. He shone a different light on King that was entirely unlike I had heard
before. By describing King’s life as a hagiography, we risk forgetting all that
King fought against. The times we life in today Dr. Cameron describes as the
“post-racial blues” era and defines the blues as the impulse to keep painful
details of a brutal existence alive. Dr. Cameron is transcribing his belief to
all of us that given enough time, America will make the correct decisions and
do the right thing; and this scares Dr. Cameron. King is the man who was the
engineer who drove the steam locomotive that was the civil rights movement from
the Underground Railroad into today’s society. Dr. Cameron is the one who
reminds us that it would be tragic to brush away the melancholy that was
segregation. This belief must resonate to transform us to become a conscience
America in the future.
An
article by Stephanie Shapiro of the Baltimore Sun explains the exact actions
that King encouraged in his letter. The owners of Dogwood Deli, Galen Sampson
and later, his wife open The Dogwood Restaurant where they hire previous
convicts and drug addicts giving them a chance to start fresh and learn to make
a career of the culinary industry. The owners believed in a dream of bettering
the community that is America and were doing it one small step at a time. I was
actually so moved by the article that I was going to suggest to friends the
idea of dining at the Dogwood this weekend. It grieves me to report that the
restaurant about which this article was written officially closed this
Sunday. It seems to me a shame
that the five star resorts with kitchens serving “Hudson
Valley foie gras in riesling aspic with warm brioche and cloudberries” can
remain in business while humble Deli’s that do the right thing continue to
fail.
Similar
to King and the story of the Sampsons, a poem entitled “Directions for
Resisting the SAT” by Richard Hague describes a belief, a belief in yourself. The
last line of the poem says it all, “Make your marks on everything”. The poem is
trying to say that it is ok to walk against the flow of conformity. The SAT is
a metaphor for any “necessity” that can be thrown your way. You do not HAVE to
do anything. You are the master of your own future. You are the only one who
can control your thoughts, dreams, beliefs and actions.
Two
very different views from the former views on beliefs come from “First
Practice” a poem by Gary Gildner and “A Father” a short story by Baharati
Mukherjee, in the form of inspiration and anger. In the poem “First Practice”, a
coach is disciplining his team and synchronizing their visions of glory with
his own. He does so in a malicious and military no-nonsense way. In the story
of “A Father”, Mr. Bhowmick struggles to maintain his religious views as a
former native of India. He was forced to have an arranged marriage and thus his
never loves his wife who is a progressive. What is shocking is that his
daughter is even more a progressive having grown up in
America. The
main conflict of the story is when his daughter gets pregnant; this challenges
all of his beliefs. In the end he believes that the ancient religion and
superstitions are greater than his love for his wife and for his daughter.
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