| ONE VOICE CAN’T SPEAK FOR MILLIONS |
| I feel compelled to reiterate a theme that I addressed in an earlier article where I emphasized that education is the key to improving our condition in the Black community. I realize that I’m at risk of sounding like Willie One-Note, but I see the need for education in the Black community as a refrain that needs to be played over and over again, because all of our problems can be boiled down to that one simple point. The fact is, God made birds to fly, fish to swim, and man to think. If a bird refuses to fly, or a fish refuses to swim, they’re not going to survive very long. The same is true of man—if a man, or a community of men, refuses to think, they cannot remain viable in this society. Education will teach us right off the bat that the only rights that we have in this world are the rights that we can take and then defend. Now, I don’t mean “take” in a military sense—that would be a recipe for disaster. When I say “take”, I mean using our collective intellect to obtain. Because it has become clear that we can’t out scream the White man, we don’t have the electronic resources. And it makes absolutely no sense to try to appeal to his compassion, because he doesn’t have any--and what’s going on in Iraq shows that we certainly can’t match him when it comes to brutality. But Martin demonstrated without a doubt that if we marshal our collective intellectual resources, we can out think this man. We are a highly creative people—we’ve simply got to develop the gift that God gave us, as our essential means of survival. God didn’t create anything in this world and leave it defenseless. He gave the chameleon the ability to change colors and blend in with its environment, to make itself virtually invisible. He gave the skunk a funk that’s so powerful that nothing wants to get close enough to eat it. And some fish can blow themselves up so large that they can’t be swallowed. He did the same with man. He placed man on Earth as a naked ape—he wasn’t as strong as the elephant, or as ferocious as the lion, and couldn’t fly like the eagle, so God gave him a brain. It didn’t seem like much, at the time, but the human mind has allowed man to create machines that can now crush any elephant, slaughter any lion, and soar well beyond the eagle’s domain. He’s done the same thing for Black people. He’s given us a highly developed sense of creativity, which, by definition, is a primary indicator of intellectual development. But our problem is, we only utilize God’s gift for our entertainment, rather than using it to soar like the eagle, and step beyond the domain of ordinary men. It’s amazing to me how the Black man fails to recognize his powerful gift of creative intellect—we’ve already seen it in action. The hill that Martin had to climb to reach the mountaintop, and see over the heads of common men, was much steeper than the molehill we have to climb today. Yet, he managed to dredge up a strength and power from his soul that was so profound that it served to lift the rest of mankind to a higher level of humanity. That was not only a testament to one Black man=s ability to pull himself up from the dust of his humble beginnings, but also, a testament to the capacity of his people to meet the test of greatness. |