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“The price of hating other human beings is loving oneself less.” ~
In 1968 I read Soul on Ice, by Eldridge Cleaver, a book that, in my college days, would move me like few others.
He said, in describing 1968, “The destiny of the entire human race depends on what is going on in America today. This is a staggering reality to the rest of the world.”
Indeed it was. Indeed it is.
“You don’t have to teach people how to be human. You have to teach them how to stop being inhuman.”
Today, my fraternity brother Mark Pearson shares his memories and music from 1968:
A few days after committing to this Pilgrimage I left for a five-week tour of Japan with The Brothers Four.
One night in a hotel room in Tokyo, in a combination of memory and imagination, I remembered who I had been and what I believed when I turned twenty-one in March of 1968.
It was clear to me as I began the spring quarter of my junior year at the University of Washington that Robert Kennedy should and likely would soon become President, that Martin Luther King, Jr. would continue to preach non-violence and social justice for years to come, that the Viet Nam War would soon be over, that the Kerner Report issued a month earlier would, as Dr. King said, offer a prescription to heal our divided land.
Mine was a faith rooted in the religious values of a small town and what I believed to be an All-American family.
Within weeks, King and Kennedy would both be dead and Lyndon Johnson would choose to not even invite the members of the Kerner Commission to the White House.
By 1969 Nixon’s secret plan for peace would morph into a secret war in Laos and Cambodia, culminating in the shooting deaths of four Kent State students by National Guard troops.
At the same time, my anger at being told not to sing anti-war songs at an All City Young Life meeting would prove catalyst enough for me to turn my back on organized religion.
In June of 1969 I was told my father had been in a mental institution when I was born and suddenly all I had learned growing up and my place in the world was placed somehow in doubt.
In that Tokyo hotel room all these years later it was finally and suddenly clear to me that at twenty-one my world was abuzz with faith and hope, and then at twenty-two I had lost faith in God, country, family, and self.
What was also clear as I watered those memories with tears was that at that moment I knew in the marrow of my being that faith was strong, hopes were high, that joy abounds, and love abides.
In no small part I credit committing to this Pilgrimage as a catalyst for those insights and that moment in that hotel room. It is with gratitude and grace and the spirit of song and singing that we are joined together on this amazing journey.
*****
“I did not know that I had all these feelings inside me. They have never been aroused before. Now they cascade down upon my head and threaten to beat me down to the ground, into the dust.” ~
Now, please enjoy this song, written and performed by Mark Pearson.