It’s the 50th anniversary of that powerful, enduring speech, and somehow I want to cry.
There is so much dreaming still to be done.
And so much pressure to abandon those dreams. To sleep so deep that we forget how to dream. To wake with no awareness of ever having had one.
Easy to be cynical and say the obvious: dreams aren’t reality. But isn’t that just an excuse for inaction? A different reality is not possible if you cannot imagine it. If you cannot imagine peace, or friendship, or even simply absence of conflict, you will not act towards it. You will be a passive bystander in your own life and that of the world around you. You will accept the status quo, however bad it is. Your lack of dreams will become your waking nightmare.
In June, I said that if we call something impossible, we act in such a way that we make it so. I stand by that. I stand by the vital human ability to defy nightmare and to insist on dreams, on different possibilities.
Even as we know we will never fully achieve them, the very least we can do is try.
Two quotes come to mind, first on the need to dream:
“You got to have a dream,
If you don’t have a dream,
How you gonna have a dream come true?”
Rodgers And Hammerstein, “Happy Talk”, South Pacific
The other on making dreams a reality:
“If you will it, it is not a dream.”
Theodor Herzl
We remember the dream articulated by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., not only because of its vision, but because of the will of Civil Rights activists to not accepts things as they were and make life better for all of us.
It is too bad that he died when he did. He did achieve some success. I lived in Tennessee for 3 years and worked with a number of African Americans who came from the social class that created the civil rights movement (one of my best friends was a child of 2 educators from Mississippi). That generation got the vote and a good measure of civil equality, but those people were already middle class and college educated. In the 1960’s when unions were relatively strong it probably seemed that the ending of legal segregation was all that was needed.
I don’t know if King saw the attacks on unions and workers rights as the coming phase of modern capitalism, but I am sure if he lived until the 1990’s he would have attacked it. Perhaps with his personality he might have succeeded.
So, civil rights movement v1, successful, v2, not so much.
I agree, I’m sure he would have. But with how much success remains, as you note, a question mark.
I will post 2 quotes from John Singer Sargent about portraits;
“A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth.”
“Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.”
sorry posted in wrong place, meant to post on the article about the woman’s portrait
Here: http://accidentaltheologist.com/2013/08/19/seeing-women/