One more day

Above is the reaction of Robert Kennedy, addressing a crowd of supporters on the evening the Rev. Martin Luther King was shot in Memphis. I heard a story about this a few weeks ago and the fact that Kennedy basically spoke off the top of his head and appealed to our better nature.

He was already scheduled to speak in a rough neighborhood in Indianapolis when he received word that King had been shot. He insisted on going ahead to the campaign stop.

From what I've heard, there was virtually no violence in that neighborhood that evening.

Additionally, Kennedy said:

So I ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King, yeah that's true, but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love - a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke.

We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times. We've had difficult times in the past. And we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; and it's not the end of disorder.

Below is a piece of King's Mountaintop speech, that he gave a day before Kennedy's and obviously, a day before he was killed. Much is made of the speech because he alludes to not being around to see the changes he was forcing and some people see that as oddly prophetic.

I've included it to dovetail with the Kennedy call for compassion and his realization that there had been tough times in the past and would be tough times in the future.

While President Obama is happy to link himself as a historical heir of Lincoln, I think he shares just as much with King and Kennedy in his calls for sacrifice and realization that the world doesn't change simple because millions of people voted for a black candidate.

With all the recent talk of race in America and what it means to have a black president, I've been a little confused. Honestly, I can't make a logical connection between Obama's election and the end of racism in our society. Many people have been eager to look to King's speech about having made it to the mountaintop and declare that we're there as of tomorrow afternoon.

I think even the most idealistic of us know that it's not that simple.

The night before he was killed, King spoke about where he would like to be if God would place him anywhere in history:

Strangely enough, I would turn to the Almighty, and say, "If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the twentieth century, I will be happy." Now that's a strange statement to make, because the world is all messed up.

The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land. Confusion all around. That's a strange statement. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century in a away that men, in some strange way, are responding — something is happening in our world.

The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee — the cry is always the same — "We want to be free."

And another reason that I'm happy to live in this period is that we have been forced to a point where we're going to have to grapple with the problems that men have been trying to grapple with through history, but the demand didn't force them to do it.

Survival demands that we grapple with them. Men, for years now, have been talking about war and peace. But now, no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it's nonviolence or nonexistence.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
April 3, 1968

While it's a nice quirk of history that many people are home today on MLK Day and Obama will be sworn in tomorrow, there is still a great deal of road to cover as alluded to by all three men. This will require hard work, understanding and, in the immediate case of the President, probably a few false starts and the need for patience.

Does his election mark the end of racism in this country? Certainly not. But it's a definite sign that it is dying.

It's worth noting

Without any editorializing or clouding what you will take from this, these three events that share the same anniversary, August 28.

1955 - About 2:30 a.m., Roy Bryant and his half brother J. W. Milam, kidnap Emmett Till from Moses Wright's home (in Money, Mississippi). They will later describe brutally beating him, taking him to the edge of the Tallahatchie River, shooting him in the head, fastening a large metal fan used for ginning cotton to his neck with barbed wire, and pushing the body into the river.

1963 - The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his "I Have a Dream Speech" in Washington, D.C.

2008 - Barack Obama plays to a full house in Denver as he accepts the Democratic nomination for president.

It's a start.

Doing the right thing

I admit that I get a weird thrill from my daily perusal of Consumerist.com and I can't quite place why.

Whether it's seeing that someone got royally screwed by a company I don't do business with or, worse yet, by one that I do, there's a nice feeling of relief that I dodged a bullet for that day.

No matter what happens, I didn't get a massive bill from AT&T or I didn't get taken to the cleaners when I was buying a flat panel TV (hint, buy online from a reputable dealer) and I can get a small degree of relief from that.

As I've grown fond of saying as I get older, "Things can always be worse."

The downside of seeing these stories churn through day in and day out is that you really lose faith in humanity when it comes to doing the right thing when an opportunity presents itself. Generally if there's a plausible excuse such as corporate policy or legal issues, people are more likely to take the easy route and avoid getting involved.

I'm not really passing judgment here - I'd probably do the same thing if I was a customer service rep getting screamed at over the phone - but it's disappointing to see every day.

That's why I'm happy I stumbled across this tonight. A series of letters from the Warsaw Rising appeared and a team from the Warsaw Rising Museum rushed to add them to their collection. The hitch was that despite the museum agreeing to pay the opening price in the auction, the collector who owned the letters decided he wanted to see what the open market would pay for the letters.

According to the article, there aren't that many letters still around because they weren't typical letters. These were letters that were hand delivered by a small, young delivery service (think The Postman, only not awful and too long) as the Nazis occupied Poland.

All of this was going on during the Warsaw Uprising, which was a 63-day standoff with German troops by an undermanned, novice army that lacked any sort of supplies. I'm not sure mail service would be at the top of my list at a time like that.

That service, run by teenagers and the Home Army resistance, was responsible for delivering 150,000 pieces of mail in two months. Their bravery is remembered as testament to Poland's long-held desire, even in the midst of battle, to function as a free state.

"You have to remember what it was like," said [Jerzy Kasprzak, a patron of the museum who was a 14-year-old scout in 1944], white-haired and brimming with memories. "During the Rising, after two or three days, it turns out people were not so concerned about food or other needs. They wanted to know: Is my son or daughter OK? And that's what those letters meant."

Skip to the end of the story, with the museum pleading for the collection - at what was seemingly a fair price - and the owner refusing to budge.

At 2:40 a.m.—and by this time the Poles were keeping minute-by-minute records of their high-stakes race—auctioneer Ulrich Felzmann had an epiphany.

He could not, according to his contract with the owner, change the actual terms of auction. But Felzmann told the museum team he had the power to change the time of the bidding.

The letters were set to be sold at an afternoon session, beginning at 12:30. Felzmann told curator Lang to find a seat when the morning session began at 10 a.m.

It's the first time this had been done in 32 years and the museum was able to bid unopposed to bring the letters home. Here's my favorite part - the quote from the managing director of the auction house, Axel Doerrenbach, when asked about what he'd done.

"No comment," Doerrenbach said. "But perhaps this helps you: This is the first time in 32 years—in the history of the auction house—that the course of auction was changed. ... And I will say this: We were very satisfied that the items went to the place—and people—where they originated."

Sometimes, it's not about money. Not often, but sometimes.

(Image from: Warsaw-Life.com)

So, what's next?

One of the benefits of high-def television is a more varied lineup that includes not only the usual lineup on the standard channels, but extra content that is specific as an HD offering. In my case, this translates directly into highly defined nerdery as I spend time with PBS and Discovery during the afternoon.

Today there was a special on the Wright Brothers and their flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903 which followed the project to recreate the flyer and get it back up in the air in North Carolina. Aside from the usual historical dog and pony show, the point that came home was the brothers' determination and real can-do attitude.

Americans eat that stuff up.

I hadn't realized that their experiments were part of a larger race to get into the air, much like the space race in the 60's. Instead of superpowers squaring off, the Wright brothers were up against a government-funded program - led by Smithsonian Institution Secretary Samuel Langley, a name that should ring bells for those in Northern Virginia - that never really got it right.

The short version is that while the Wrights spent time with full scale gliders, wind tunnels and working out the problems that would eventually be solved by their aileron systems, the Langley groups built models and tried to upscale them to full-sized flyers.

That course of action didn't work out too well. Well, that, and the fact that the brothers used $4 worth of steel to serve as the track to launch their machine, while Langley opted for an oversized catapult that ran into the tens of thousands of dollars and failed miserably.

Even after successful flights in Kitty Hawk most people across the United States still saw them as foolish up until they'd secured a government contract with the Army by keeping a plane in the air for an hour.

In a just a few years, they'd gone from four flights in North Carolina - of 120, 175, 200 and finally 852 feet - to keeping aloft for well over an hour with the pressure of performing for the military. In just over 100 years, look at how far the airplane has come.

That brings us to the second point that was focused on at the tail end of the show - the first being, "Never trust the government to get things done quickly, practically or cheaply" - which was that the flight and ensuing explosion of aeronautical advances took the population from a standpoint of, "If God wished us to fly, he'd have given us wings," to, "If we can do that, what can't we do?"

That's the most striking thing that I took from the Wrights' story - what is left in today's world that would elicit that type of response? What's left to spur the imagination and pull in that type of response from everyone?

A mission to Mars or beyond is an extension of previous space travel.

A cure for AIDS or cancer would have a life-changing impact on those who are stricken with those diseases, but are again an extension of existing medical advances and take a living human and keep them alive, which isn't very heavy on the wow factor.

Humans have found ways to tame the wilderness, forge societies that guarantee that there is very little that we would want for and found ways to conquer the land, sea and finally, air. What's left in the logical progression?

That depresses me a bit.

With the strides humanity has made so far, there's not much that comes to mind that is left as a big ticket dream of humanity to accomplish. We can fly into outer space faster or further, but it doesn't have the same awe-inspiring aspects as the first space missions.

The remaining big-ticket societal hurdles -which would certainly be a virtual bounty for humanity around the globe - are extensions of the tracks we're on or simply cleaning up the messes we've made for ourselves.

We can cure all disease, but that'd be seen as curing the rest of the diseases we hadn't gotten to yet.

We can feed the world and sort out global warfare, but those are mopping up problems mankind created for themselves. Not that I'm against tackling any of those issues - you'd have to be a pretty defective human being to turn your back on eradication of disease, world warfare or anything else in that category - it's just that to make today's world stop and take notice, there would have to be a greater deal of sizzle.

On top of that, take the things we've decided are impossible - like bringing the dead back to life - and those wouldn't be seen so much as a global triumph as a crime against God and nature.

So, is this a matter of a population that asks for more and more or are we simply more self-centered? While we can certainly amaze ourselves and our small circle of family and friends - as in, "I ran a marathon, isn't that amazing?" or "I managed to graduate from college despite coming from a poor background, isn't that amazing?" - what's left to amaze everyone?

When did individual triumphs supersede global ones?

So where does that leave us at the end of this ramble? No worse off than at the beginning and with no more answers. But really, what's next?

What will make us all stop in our tracks, look around and say to each other, "We did that... what can't we do?"

(Image from Wikipedia.org / OUHSC.edu)