Tuning In (to MLK)

This is something I wrote for morning announcements at Patrick Henry Elementary School around this time of year during one of my last years at work.

When I was a boy I didn’t watch the news much. When I watched TV, I’d usually skip right over it and change the channel to something I thought was more interesting.

But once in a while when I got to the news, I’d hear this -- voice. It was just a man speaking, but his voice sounded almost like music – the way that it would rise and fall, the way that sometimes he would hold a word long, almost like a note in a song, then let his words rest for a moment – to suddenly pick them up again with even greater power and purpose and energy than before. I had never heard anybody talk like that.

So my arm would be getting tired, because I wanted to change the channel – because back then there were no remotes, and you had to have your hand up on the knob on the TV to do that – but I couldn’t seem to change the channel while this man was talking.

And so I started tuning in to what he was saying – and the meaning of his words was as wonderful as the sound in the music of his voice. He was speaking of great ideas, of things like freedom, equality, and fairness. He was talking about treating other human beings as if they really were other human being – which, of course, is what we all are. This was in the 1960s, during the civil rights movement. By now I bet you may have guessed that the voice I was hearing belonged to Dr. Martin Luther King.

Many years later, I finally figured out what filled that voice with such power and purpose and music and beauty. His voice was filled with the sound of someone who cared about the whole world. Everybody. He never had the opportunity to meet you, but he cared about you – and about the children you’re going to have, and about the children your children will have. He was looking way ahead. He had been to the mountaintop of his own caring. He was dreaming the great dream of a world where all people treated other people as if they mattered, as if they really were – people – which, of course, we all are, wherever we are from, however we look, however we dress, and whatever languages we speak.

So what Dr. King helped teach me is that one person, one single human being, can literally care about the whole wide world. Which is pretty amazing when you stop and think about it. One person: the whole world.

And I hope very much that as you begin to get a little older, you’ll start asking yourselves the question raised by Dr. King: How big can I care? Because a whole lot depends on how you will decide to answer that question.

Because finally, even though Dr. King accomplished so much, his dream will come true only when enough of us start that long climb up the mountain to discover the content of our character and the far horizons of how much we can care.