Last year I got sucked into watching some ridiculous reality show called Preachers of Detroit. I think I started watching it because I missed visiting the city and hadn't been there in a little bit.
The show -- Preachers of Detroit -- was about 7 preachers in Detroit and all the drama that surrounded each of their lives. Many of you may know that reality shows are a put-on. Most of it isn't real. There are scripts and set-ups that don't reflect real life at all. Needless to say, I watched the entire season of this stupid show.
The point?
One of the preachers -- Pastor David Bullock -- had said in an earlier episode about how he thought Martin Luther King had failed in his dream for human rights. And that comment really bothered me at the time. In fact, it still does bother me.
For anything to change, awareness needs to take place. And awareness can't take place until people are directed to their wrongful thinking in the first place. And that NEVER happens unless somebody puts them on the path of understanding what is wrong with their thinking or why old values are outdated and inappropriate to carry on with.
Martin Luther King's role was to create that awareness or, as we call it now, "start the conversation" about what's wrong with the way things are. And why things need to change. In that regard, I believe he was successful.
Of course, what I think Pastor Bullock was suggesting is that, because we still experience prejudices today, maybe that's why he perceived Martin Luther King as having failed. I'm just guessing. I don't know. But some things don't change overnight. Rome wasn't built in a day. And we still have a long way to go on a great many issues that we're dealing with in today's day and age.
My thoughts on it: I have the utmost respect for anyone who takes a stand against the popular masses. It takes a lot of balls to rage against the machine, especially back then when not many had your back and NOBODY in the "organization" was on your side. There had to be many times when he wanted to give up or second-guessed what he was doing yet he forged ahead with the hopes that one day everyone would be equal.
In the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan is the Rosa Parks bus. I sat on the bus in the very seat that Rosa Parks sat in when she started her part of the revolution that would begin to change history. It was a powerful feeling to sit there in that seat and it was, quite possibly, the most amazing charge I felt go through my body; just to know that this woman made a decision on that bus that would cause so much strife toward change was amazing. She's amazing because I knew she was alone when she made that decision that day. No one supported her at that moment. It was just her. Her against the world.
I found myself in just a minuscule version of such a situation by standing up for something I knew to be true -- to be the voice for others who cannot speak -- and dealt with a lot of riff-raff because of it. And this was nowhere near what the REAL warriors of revolution went through. So, I can't imagine what it takes to be this type of hero and to know that you could lose it all when everything is said and done. It's like pushing all your chips on the poker table because you believe so much in your cause that it becomes all or nothing. You'd rather die than accept status quo. And that's a revolutionary warrior.
Anyone who stands up for what they believe in is someone who will always put me in a state of awe. Because there are so few of these people anymore. But what we do have is their accomplishments of yesterday and how they forced the hand of a revolution that would have never happened any other way.
And for that, they did NOT fail. It's just still a work in progress, just like every other aspect of life.
See you at the top!
Your mentor,
Monica Main
