Our society and our whole world are in several serious crises all at once.
Powerful forces keep making things worse. They want to intimidate us — to make us sit down and shut up so they can continue to oppress us.
But better values do exist, and nonviolence is actually more powerful than The Establishment. (My free online workshop series “Nonviolent Grassroots Organizing” helps us understand and use nonviolence in clever, strategic ways.) Ever since the Civil Rights Movement’s era, I have appreciated Martin Luther King’s strong, bold, radical message and his methodology. I have read his books and studied him extensively. I know a number of people who had worked very closely with him on a day-to-day basis during the Movement, including the older white man sitting next to him on the first integrated bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in December 1956.
King was fully aware of — and fully immersed in — very serious problems. His religious faith and his faith in the power of nonviolence and strategic “people-power” kept him grounded and kept him active. He called for a “Radical Revolution of Values.”
In recent years people have been trying to water him down to the “I Have a Dream” speech, because a “dream” is something not real – something possibly for the future – something that does not compel radical change now. That is why the Establishment wants to limit him to the “Dream.”
We need to keep King’s holiday boldly relevant to help people change political/social/economic SYSTEMS, rather than what it has become in mainstream America: a day to apply band-aids for service delivery, a day to pick up litter or paint park benches, etc.
Instead of letting his message get watered down to merely a “Dream,” let’s remember a much more powerful speech that the power elite want us to forget. Please click this: https://www.dailyposter.com/a-radical-revolution-of-values/