Head of School Blog

As our nation pauses today to honor and celebrate the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I fear we have lost a major part of his message…treating others with dignity and respect. Below, I present several statements (in bold italics) made by Dr. King that I believe would benefit all of us if we lived them out in our daily lives.

In the 1950's and 1960's Dr. King was the face and voice of the civil rights movement. During his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, one line stands out to me as a strategy he employed during his struggle to end racial segregation and discrimination.

“We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline.” His belief that dignity and discipline should guide how those in the civil rights movement should act goes to the core of his message that all people are created equal and should be treated as such. Treating others with dignity is not dependent on them, it is a matter of our personal character.

“Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.” Unfortunately, social media is filled with these two traits. And social media is where many of our kids prefer to live right now, so they are inundated with messages of hatred and bitterness. James Baldwin said, “Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.” If Baldwin's quote is true, which I believe it is, it's easy to understand why so many of our kids are filled with hatred toward others.

“Let no man pull you so low as to hate him.” I see so many people on social media posting their hatred and vitriol toward those who hold different views/beliefs. When we post hatred, the message we are sending to our kids is that hatred is okay. Hatred brings nothing good. As for me, I choose the same as Dr. King when he said, “I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.”

“There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.”  We are quick to point out the bad in others, and slow to recognize it in ourselves. When I was teaching high school history, and we were discussing the Founding Fathers of the United States, students would bring up all the bad they read about the founders, as if the bad invalidated the good they did. It was at this point that I would make the lesson personal and ask if they want to be remembered for the bad things they have done and will do in their lives.

“People fail to get along because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don't know each other; they don't know each other because they have not communicated with each other.” Lately, I have seen a lot of social media friends posting things like “unfriend me if you believe…; you are not a decent person if you like or believe…; I want nothing to do with you if you think…” These posts do not open communication; in fact, they simply drive a deeper wedge between people. When we post these, or similar statements, we tell others that their opinion/point of view is not worth my time, which means that person is not worth my time. This is not “the high plane of dignity and discipline” exhibited by Dr. King. One of the lessons my team and I are trying to teach our students at Edison is to get to know people and listen to their viewpoints. We want them to live out Stephen Covey's habit of “seek first to understand.” This lesson gets undermined when kids get on social media and see friends or family members with posts like I mentioned above.

“Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.” Love requires us to get to know each other and understand where the other person is coming from. We may not change someone's beliefs or views, but we can change the way we treat each other.

We, as adults, must take seriously the responsibility we have been given to lead the next generation and be good role models for them. Again, to paraphrase James Baldwin, kids may not listen to us, but they will imitate us.

So…let us give them good things to imitate. Let us return to treating each other with dignity, by taking the time to communicate with each other and truly try to understand each other's viewpoints. Let us be careful about the social media posts we make…our kids are seeing them.

Each of us must choose to return to the “high plane of dignity and discipline” for the sake of our children and posterity.