I just finished watching Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream ” speech from 1963.
I don’t know about you, but I feel like we are living in some combination of the 1960s civil rights movement, the 1980s Cold War, and the 1990s Operation Desert Shield.
My dad, who passed almost a year to the day, may have seen today’s events through the lens of the Vietnam War era which he experienced as an adult and stories of World War II and the Great Depression that were relayed to him as a child and young man given he was born the same year the War started and the Great Depression ended (1939).
My grandfather would find the current situation in Ukraine all too familiar. He was a Russian-Orthodox priest who fled Ukraine during the Bolshevik-Ukraine War (1917 – 1921), which resulted in Ukraine being incorporated into the USSR.
It’s a good news / bad news story. Bad, because we’ve been here before and apparently haven’t quite learned not to repeat history. Good, because we’ve managed to see our way out of it again and again.
Yet, the question remains: What do you do when it feels like the world will explode if someone lights a match?
In honor of yesterday’s MLK Jr. Day, a federal holiday since 1986, let’s start with your dream.
Why your dream? Because if one man can shift a nation’s perspective, maybe you can too. Maybe each of us has the same opportunity.
Here’s the invitation. It comes in the form of 3 questions:
“What is your dream?”
“Why is it important?”
“Who benefits from your dream?”
Maybe your work won’t shift a nation’s perspective. Maybe it will.
Maybe it just shifts the perspective of people around you.
Maybe it’s about shifting your own perspective. Only one way to find out.
