Time always right to do right
On the eve of another Martin Luther King, Jr Day, I found myself reflecting on our recent debates over the Vermont Declaration of Inclusion.
I’ve heard that some who opposed the statement feel as if they were drowned out of the conversation or unwelcome to speak at all.
I don’t read every Front Porch Forum update, but I haven’t seen anything that should scare anyone from speaking their mind. And I absolutely do not view this issue as one of political affiliation.
In my posts, I have always relied on facts and statistics more than my own experiences, but today I’m changing that.
I live in east Charlotte and work in west, so there is no divide for me.
I’m almost 50, born into Jimmy Carter’s America.
I grew up on Army posts, mostly in the South.
One of these had an actual moated fort where African Americans who escaped captivity were allowed to join Union regiments (led by white officers) during the Civil War and Jefferson Davis was later imprisoned.
In 1994, a sign was placed just steps outside this fort to commemorate the landing place of the first Africans to arrive in North America as enslaved forced labor in 1619.
On these Army posts, my friends were kids of all skin tones and ethnicities, all socioeconomic backgrounds. However, when we went home, most of the white kids went home to officers’ quarters, while most of the other kids’ fathers were enlisted soldiers. This remains the situation in the Army 40 years later.
I played baseball and soccer with kids who grew up on farms outside of Little Rock, Arkansas, and other kids in the suburbs of DC who grew up in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.
After school I was a manual laborer for many years with guys who had come to the U.S. from Jamaica, Nicaragua, Mexico and Viet Nam, amongst other places, and sent every spare penny of their paychecks to family back home. I worked with men who had been incarcerated, men and women with disabilities from dangerous working conditions, people who were recovering from addiction.
I worked with women who cooked in boarding school kitchens so they could send their own kids to college. I worked with women on overnight shifts who went straight home to wake their kids up for breakfast before taking them to school.
I worked with kids who were brilliant but effectively homeless and living on and off the streets.
When I moved from manual labor to mental labor, I worked with people of color who had worked their asses off to reach a level just below a white guy who was handed a job because he was chummy with the bosses. Those same people were always the first to be let go when there was even the vaguest suggestion that profits might go down.
I’ve interviewed countless marginalized people about their lives and experiences in America and around the world.
My own family includes people who came here as immigrants and have worked 360 days a year for 30 years to achieve the “American dream,” people who have been abandoned because they were crippled by multiple sclerosis, people who suffer from mental illness, people who survive off Section 8 and welfare.
My friends include basically every other type of person who might feel recognized by this declaration, and by god, if you’re reading the declaration and do not recognize yourself or someone you love in it, then I beg you to reflect on how lucky you are. Or maybe just read it again.
Now I live in Vermont, the first sovereign state in the world to abolish slavery (as the Vermont Republic in 1777), home to the first institution of higher learning for women in the United States, its first African American college graduate (who became the first African American to serve in a state legislature), the first woman lieutenant governor, the first state in the US to legalize same-sex civil unions and gay marriage, and the first state to enshrine the right to abortion in its state constitution. A sanctuary state.
I live half a mile from land that was owned by free African Americans in 1800, just 16 years after the first permanent settlers arrived in Charlotte and 6 miles from a former safe house on the Underground Railroad.
So, you Vermonters have been performing inclusivity and virtue signaling long before I got here. I’m sure that, come Monday morning, “I Have a Dream” quotes will be flying around DC, and I’m also sure they won’t be quoting the lines that formed the core message of that speech.
But for our purposes, there’s one more fitting. Two years after his “Dream” speech and just a few months after his famous march in Selma, King delivered a speech to Oberlin College titled, “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution”.
“Let nobody give you the impression that only time will solve the problem. That is a myth,” King told the young graduates. “We must help time and realize that the time is always right to do right.”