wonder…
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| MLK Memorial, Washington DC |
Today we honor Martin Luther King. And for those of us who
are fortunate enough to have been present during his life, the memories of his
impact have significant meaning to the form and direction of our world.
The civil rights movement reached its most critical intensity
in the midst of my childhood, and my earliest images include those terrible and
iconic photos and newscasts of brave civil rights activists in the South. Seeing those images now, fifty years later,
the shocking truth of those events and the singleminded courage of those who
put their lives at risk remains as formative to who I am as the pictures and
memories in my family albums.
In the midst of all the photos and documents from
mid-century, a friend posted a photo from 1913, just before my mother was born. I was struck anew by the radical changes in
our world between my mother’s birth a hundred years ago and mine in the midst
of that mid-century turmoil. And it struck me that my granddaughter will be
born this spring, a century almost to the day after her grandma came into the
world. And I wonder what her world will bring, what our legacy will be and what
she will remember of my world.
My mother was born on a farm in upstate NY with no phone, no
electricity and no plumbing; her mom cooked on a wood-burning stove. Saturdays
mornings were spent cleaning kerosene lanterns, and Sundays they traveled to
church in a wagon with bricks under their feet to keep them warm. Ten miles was
a long distance, and the closest neighbors on adjoining farms were well out
contact, much less available for “play dates”.
She went to a one-room school house until high school, and then left the
farm (quite daringly) to become a nurse in New York City.
Her youngest child, I sit at a my laptop in my centrally
heated room; I’ve been to Asia and Europe, have friends all over the world and
I will not only write this, but publish it in about ten minutes. I can go where
I want (relatively cheaply) and have access- through this 15” screen- to a
world of information more complete than any library I visited as a student in
the 1970’s.
In the middle of all this change- just about dead center, as
I was a child and my mother approached middle age- the most astounding changes
of all occurred, and these were quite likely fueled by the explosion in exposure-
in communication, in visual and verbal connection, in TV nd photos and radio
and, eventually, internet.
Before we could see, we didn’t challenge the status quo.
Before we could hear the cries of children in Montgomery, we didn’t think that
anything was wrong. When it was our neighbors who were agreeing with the status
quo we accepted it as is.
But when the window to the world was opened, and we saw hoses
and attack dogs set upon young and peaceful protestors, we looked. And we were
horrified by what we people can do to each other.
When we saw photos of a Buddhist monk set himself on fire in
protest to war, we were shocked.
When we could see what was happening in Southeast Asia and in
Eastern Europe, we paid attention, and we protested. But that was in the days
of 13 channels and print media.
Sadly, the over-proliferation of images and connection may
have numbed us a little. And the limits on what we’re permitted to “see” during
“war” has made us forget the results of
violence upon each other. We are sheltered and exposed at the same time,
we can filter and turn our attention away from the grim and atrocious with a
click of a button.
We still have moments of miracles when we are awed by the
overwhelming courage of an act by someone whose life is endangered by what we
take for granted. The bravery of a young woman shot in the head for learning to
read stopped the world last year. My mother, with her limited exposure to the world at large, would never
have known about Malala Yousafzai in Pakistan.
Our world is a very different place, and community has come
to mean something much broader. In some ways claustrophobic and overly
connected, one positive result is that we have a more immediate sense of broader
social responsibility.
In the same way that our wilderness has disappeared and we
have to take responsibility for the many creatures we’ve displaced, so too the shrinking of our
world has made our interconnection more critical. We are all neighbors now in a
way that we weren’t in the year my mother was born, when her closest contacts with
her neighbors came on cold Sundays by wagon and numbered in the teens. We are
now connected in a way that makes our web of life more vulnerable and, conversely, stronger; and it was about
half a century ago, in the violence rained down upon peaceful resisters that we
first saw our connections to each other in a way that was new. That is Dr. King's real legacy, and it gives me hope.
