The Baba Yelka Project tells a story of Ukrainian culture little known to the public.
Michael Andrews, a Peace Corps Response Volunteer in Ukraine, is using his photography expertise to connect with and help preserve Ukrainian village culture and traditions. Michael began his Peace Corps Response service as an organizational capacity building specialist for 100% LIFE Kropyvnytskyi, an HIV-service nongovernmental organization, and has expanded his service to encompass a secondary project as a photographer in the Baba Yelka cultural expedition. He has taken on an important role in Ukraine that has enabled him to immerse himself in the culture of a region not well represented there.
“Like most Americans, I knew nothing about Ukraine before I came here,” Michael said. “Learning Ukraine’s history, traditions and culture, and experiencing first hand their challenges as an emerging democracy – sharing myself with them – has had a profound impact on my life.”
Peace Corps Response plays an important role in building bridges between people and local organizations. The Baba Yelka Project is sponsored by the Nova Gazeta, a regional Ukrainian newspaper based in Kropyvnytskyi.
Baba Yelka is named for a woman named Elka, who lived in the Maloviskivskyi district of the Kirovograd region of Ukraine. “She knew hundreds of folk songs, treated people with herbs, raised ten children, and experienced the Holodomor.” She is the inspiration for this cultural preservation project, one that resonates with the team; many of the team members see their own grandmothers as their very own “Baba Elkas.” It is in memory of them that Michael and the Baba Yelka team work to ensure these cultural traditions are not lost.
Baba Yelka was conceived in 2018 by Inna Tilnova, editor of Nova Gazeta, Svіtlana Bulanova, a performer of traditional Ukrainian songs, and Viktoria Semenenko, a journalist and public relations professional. Photographer and video expert, Alexander Mayorov, helped launch the project. Michael became intrigued with their work soon after arriving in Ukraine and asked to join them. After deliberation, they said yes. That was ten months and thousands of photographs ago.
The team of five Ukrainians and one American, Michael, has visited 30 villages now with the goal of documenting and preserving authentic Ukrainian culture. During their visits, grandmothers in the villages share their stories, songs, traditional clothing and handiwork.
“One of the cultural markers of the true Ukrainian identity is the folk song, which Baba Yelka reveals and preserves,” said Inna Tilnova, one of Baba Yelka’s founders. “For some people, the Ukrainian folk song is something forgotten and not relevant. But for others, it is the whole universe, a way of identification and self-expression. We travel in search of authentic folk songs that have survived to record and share them. These are our greatest treasures, our sources, our depth.”
The team didn’t just interview Ukrainian villagers; they became a part of their culture, sharing meals and stories with one another. “I am overwhelmed by the generosity, hospitality and resilience of the people of Ukraine,” Michael said. “I have been welcomed with open arms since the day I arrived in country, by my host families, at 100% LIFE Kropyvnytskyi (the organization that has enabled me to make an impact as a Response Volunteer), and by my Ukrainian friends on the Baba Yelka team.”
This brochure, created by the team, is used to promote this exhibition of authentic Ukrainian culture. Michael says it also serves as one of the only pieces of written material for the general public about folk culture in an oblast that is least represented and obscured by history.
“In spite of incredible hardships endured by Ukrainian people, particularly village grandmothers, they still have songs in their hearts and sparks of happiness in their eyes.” – PCR Volunteer Michael
These gallery-style photo presentations of village visits paint a larger picture. “Promoting understanding about these unique traditions both inside Ukraine and with the world is an important part of the country’s emerging freedom and independence,” Michael said. “We want other communities to work to preserve and transfer the wisdom and knowledge of the ‘old-timers’ in the same fashion as the Baba Yelka expeditions.”
On serving as a Response Volunteer, Michael says, “I think it is important this story not be about me as much as it is about the important role Peace Corps Response fills in building bridges, what we accomplish together with our Ukrainian hosts. I hear this sentiment echoed by my Peace Corps Ukraine Volunteer peers; we feel we have two families – those we love back home and those we love here.”
Peace Corps Response sends experienced professionals on short-term, high-impact assignments in collaboration with local host country organizations around the world. View all PCR openings here.
About Michael Andrews: Michael is a Peace Corps Response Volunteer serving in Ukraine as an Organizational Capacity Building Specialist for HIV-service NGOs. He was expected to complete his service in July 2019 but is planning on extending his time at his current post by at least a year because he is committed to reaching PEPFAR’s goals in combating the Ukrainian HIV/AIDS epidemic. __________________________________________________________________________________
The great Russian dissident poet on Russian ambitions and the revival of Stalin.
Editors’ note: This article is from the Winter 2021 issue of the Nonprofit Quarterly, “We Thrive: Health for Justice, Justice for Health.”
In recent years, a growing uneasiness and an undercurrent of anxiety have emerged in the United States. Psychologists, therapists, social workers, and doctors across the medical spectrum agree that we are in the middle of a genuine national mental health crisis. A time like this can serve as an impetus for reclaiming self-care as a movement, which could have a profound and lasting impact on this country and the world. As the late beloved activist and writer Audre Lorde said, self-care is not “self-indulgent” but rather an act of “self-preservation.”1
Self-care reaches beyond the individual. In Sanskrit, the term for self-actualization and individuation is samadhi, which means enlightenment or unionwiththedivine. This word recognizes that we are more than just our individual selves: we are a sum of all the parts that surround us. Every life is of value, and we are all connected; when we recognize this, we can embark on the healing work that addresses the traumas of our culture.
Today, we are seeing calls for change and transformation of our world. We are seeing people rise up in their power to assert that their lives are important, valuable, and worth fighting for. We are also showing solidarity by giving our friends and loved ones messages of strength and support as they dismantle systems that are oppressive and archaic. By starting with the inner work, we address many of our root issues and work our way through them. If we all simultaneously commit to healing ourselves and healing our trauma, our own healing becomes a contribution to the health and wellness of our communities, our descendants, and the world.
Take a moment to imagine the power of a self-care movement—a wave of kind care connecting communities, healing our bodies and minds, sustaining our energy and momentum, and helping us all live healthier, happier, and more balanced lives.
Self-Care as a Movement
As a movement, self-care has a rich and radical history.2 It was born at the intersection of the women’s liberation movement and the civil rights era—a time when courageous individuals and communities fighting relentless prejudice and discrimination created the first formalized communities of care, which allowed them to stand strong together in the face of seemingly impossible challenges and unspeakable treatment. In fact, a core piece of what civil rights activists were and continue to be fighting for can be seen as the basic human right to self-care—for when the government turns its back on its people, self-care literally becomes a matter of life and death. Often denied medical treatment at hospitals and healthcare centers in the past, and facing any number of dangers stemming from unequal and unjust treatment in the present, part of what people of color are fighting for is the freedom, time, money, and resources to care for themselves. In this exhausting battle, often the only support they find is with one another and within themselves. Thus, civil rights leaders made healthcare a priority. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and the most inhuman.”3
What has been true for the civil rights movement has also been true for the women’s liberation movement. Women across the board have viewed controlling their own health as a corrective to the failures of a white, patriarchal medical system to properly tend to their needs. Self-care, as described by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, an associate professor of history at the New School, in New York City, became “a claiming [of] autonomy over the body as a political act against institutional, technocratic, very racist, and sexist medicine.”4
In this age of the industrial wellness complex—an era of bath bombs, drop-in meditation studios, and self-help quick-tips lists—capitalism ignores that for populations most in need, self-care is neither frivolous nor easy. As a movement, self-care and communal care make the declaration that we don’t just deserve to be alive, we have the right to live our best lives. Genuine self-care and communal care are long and hard paths. They require diving beneath the surface problems, which are just the symptoms of the deeper, more enduring traumas that all of us carry. What we need, and what this movement seeks, is—to use a concept coined by Ghanaian playwright and journalist Esther Armah—emotional justice.5 Emotional justice can provide us with a steady undercurrent, like a river flowing beneath the exterior crust of the Earth, as we embark on dismantling and rebuilding social systems that don’t work for us. Emotional justice depends upon our commitment to doing the inner work; it cannot exist without it.
This type of work can show up in different forms, like healing from an offense that was never recognized by the offender or by society, or having the courage to speak up for ourselves and write our own stories. Individual inner work is not enough to support a movement. In social and political movements, commitment to community care, which means our own and others’ emotional justice, is a fundamental building block. What defines any movement— including the self-care movement—is people coming together with a shared purpose to create change that benefits everyone. Movements need people with skin in the game and the energy and desire to move the needle and drive change.
Standards of Self-Care
I define self-care as the practice of taking an active role in protecting one’s own well-being, pursuing joy, and having the ability, tools, and/or resources to respond to periods of stress so that they don’t result in imbalance and lead to a health crisis. Ultimately, every person should have access to the caregivers, transportation, treatment, and funds needed to properly address their health. Building a self-care movement—one that can support every other movement in turn—requires incorporating it into our communities and workplaces so that communities of care become part of our culture.
The slow adoption of self-care in our culture is in large part due to a lack of definition. Standards for self-care have never been clearly established. Creating a well-defined vision for self-care grounded in clear principles and standards is a good first step to take, because defining the standards and providing a clear road map for people to follow helps to legitimize the cause. It allows people to create plans, measure progress, and make changes based on realistic and achievable goals rooted in sustainability, which in this hyperproductive capitalist culture is rarely if ever prioritized.
In terms of movement work, exhausted leadership is poor leadership. The reward for productivity should not be the assignment of more work—whether for leaders, paid employees, or volunteers. Exhaustion leads to shorter attention spans, increased emotional volatility, and poor decision making. If movement leaders burn out, that will be replicated by others in our sphere of influence—coworkers, staff, volunteers, children, and so on.
Social transformation work begins with the self. Imagine advocacy work as a series of peaks and valleys. The peaks are where advocacy work happens, and the valleys are where we rest, celebrate, and reflect, gathering our strength to climb the mountain ahead. If we conduct our lives this way and model this workflow in our organizations, we can build resilience, make sure that we keep people engaged, and ensure that none of us falls victim to burnout.
The modern self-care movement can embody practices that avoid burnout rather than merely being a response to it. The movement must demand that individuals put their health and wellness first without feelings of guilt for doing so. If we all collectively share our plans for self-care, we declare boldly that our needs, our state of mind, our body, and our overall health matter. This gives others permission to invest in themselves and take the courageous step to acknowledge that they have needs, that their needs are important, and that those needs deserve to be met.
There are key reflective questions we can ask ourselves and those on our teams and in our communities at every turn and with every incremental step forward that can improve our actions and build momentum to climb the next peak. For example:
How does the quality of my leadership diminish due to lack of my own self-care?
Which habits negatively impact my self-care, and what new behaviors can I substitute for them?
Do I have a self-care plan in place to ensure I follow up on new behaviors, and have I shared this plan with others who will hold me accountable?
How will I track my progress along the way?
How can I best support others in their self-care endeavors?
Such questions will help us to integrate self-care with community care and social movements, paving the path forward to achieve balance among all three and to cease having to choose one over the other.
When we work on the self, we do not need to abandon the world. When we begin the process of care with ourselves, we begin the journey of working to heal our community and the world. It is my hope that we each show up, fractured or whole but always beautiful, with our unique talents and skills to create the world we envision. No action is too small, no voice too quiet, and no person too insignificant to make a change. May we realize that our investment in the inner work awakens awareness to something else, something radical and liberating: a possibility. We matter, our voices matter, our lives are precious, and we have many gifts to offer. When our inner work is deeply embodied in the collective life of those working for social transformation, this creates resilience within the group, so that when natural bumps or boulders in the journey arise we don’t give up. Instead, we stay the course, adjust course, or shore up our reserves and capacity. We celebrate and introduce play, creativity, and lightness into our efforts. We remember the purpose, meaning, and inspiration behind what we’re doing, and it supports us in moving forward.
My eldest uncle, a very pious man, would often share with me wisdom from the Old Testament and the Talmud (also known as the Oral Torah). One of the verses that he shared when I was barely thirteen has been a guidepost for my work: “Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly now, love mercy now, walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”6
Movementsarenotgoals.Therearenofinishlines.Movementsembodyincrementalgains that require consistent forward motion born out of actionable intentions. Creating sustainable movements requires widening our perspective of self-care—shifting it from a purely individual pursuit to one that embraces the entire community and uses the entire toolbox of best practices and resources. While self-care and communal care are movements in themselves, they also provide the primary infrastructure that supports every other movement, whether for equity, justice, peace, or freedom. In order to sustain forward movement—even if it’s millimeter by painful millimeter at a time—the pillar of societal care must be championed.
NOTES
Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light: Essays (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1988),
Martin Luther King Jr., speech at the second convention of the Medical Committee for Human Rights, Chicago, March 25, 1966, quoted in John Dittmer, The Good Doctors: The Medical Committee for Human Rights and the Struggle for Social Justice in Health Care (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009).
When The Washington Post published the first list of members of Congress who were slaveowners last month, the article included a call to action: Help us complete the database.
Ruette Watson was among dozens of readers who responded with searing evidence of enslavement. The outpouring included wills handwritten in the 19th century; birth certificates of babies born into slavery on congressmen’s plantations; newspaper ads placed by senators or representatives seeking the return of Black people who fled captivity; letters and book excerpts and journal articles. And in the case of Watson, an oral history project focused on Black women that included a 1977 interview with her remarkable grandmother, Esther Mae Prentiss Scott.
Thanks to Watson and scores of other amateur and professional researchers — who emailed from as far away as China and France and ranged from high school students to presidential historians — The Post’s tally of slaveholders who once served in Congress has grown from 1,715 to 1,795.
Post readers helped reveal even larger share of congressional enslavers
More than half the men elected to Congress from 1789 to 1819 were slaveholders, the research showed. Readers helped The Post identify dozens more enslavers since the initial story published on Jan. 10.
The list of congressmen still left to research remains long as well — it shrank from 677 names to 587. In other words: You too can help.
Watson, 67 and retired from a career in IT at Rutgers University, was reading The Post’s story about congressional enslavers when she was surprised to see a familiar name: Rep. Seargent Smith Prentissof Mississippi. He was on The Post’s list of congressmen who still needed to be researched.
Prentiss, who served in the House of Representativesfrom 1838 to 1839, is known to historians as one of the wealthiest men in Mississippi in his time and as an exceptional orator. Daniel Webster is said to have called Prentiss the greatest speechmaker he ever heard. But Watson knows him for something else: She has Prentisses in her family, who took that name from the man who enslaved them.LEFT: Jefferson Prentiss Sr. shown in a photograph from about 1919, was born into slavery, like his father Monroe. (Family photo) RIGHT: Seargent Smith Prentiss, a Mississippi slaveholder, served in Congress from 1838 to 1839. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Watson pointed a Post reporter to the oral history, in which a Radcliffe researcher recorded an interview with Watson’s grandmother 45 years ago. In the interview, Esther Mae Prentiss Scott remembered her grandfather Monroe Prentiss telling her about his brutal journey to America. He was smuggled in secret long after the U.S. prohibition on the importation of enslaved people took effect in 1808, kidnapped from Africa and taken first to Holland and then to Seargent Smith Prentiss’s Mississippi plantation.
“He said they were in the hull of the ship like sardines in a can,” Scott, who died in 1979, told the interviewer.
Heartbroken by his separation from his brother Jefferson, who was enslaved on a different plantation, Monroe named his son Jefferson — also born into slavery — in honor of his brother, Scott recalled.
The Black Prentisses understood the origins of their name.
“I’m wearing a slave name now,” she recounted. “My mother died with a slave name, Prentiss, and my grandfather died with a slave name. … He got that Prentiss from Seargent S. Prentiss. … Well, I’m not ashamed of it.”
Seargent Smith Prentiss is now on The Post’s list of slaveholders. And Watson said she’s proud to help preserve the memory of her grandmother’s grandfather.
“We’re not that far out of slavery itself,” she said. “I could reach back one person away.”
Watson knew her grandmother, a gifted blues musician who performed with Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith as a young woman. Scott worked as a maid in Mississippi and then eventually followed her daughter to the nation’s capital, where she became the beloved “Mother Scott” of her Columbia Heights church. She recorded an album at age 79, which Watson recently digitized and made available on YouTube.
Watson knew her grandmother, and her grandmother knew Monroe Prentiss. Slavery feels not so far away sometimes to Watson, who lives in Princeton, N.J. “We haven’t been that long from that situation. People seem to think it was forever ago, and it wasn’t,” she said. “They not only survived, but I exist today because of their strength and their ability to cope and to make the best of what life gave them.”
Watson was one of many readers who wrote to The Post about their families. Some were descendants of congressmen and others of the people the congressmen enslaved.
The research that Chris Pupke, who works in wildlife conservation and lives in Centreville, Md., had conducted on his family led him to a congressman. Pupke, 51, found that an ancestor of his had been a major slaveholder, leaving more than 100 enslaved people to his heirs when he died.
One of those enslaved people was Alfred Cooper. Pupke traced Cooper’s story — eventually he was enslaved by Rep. John Brewer Brown of Maryland, who gave Cooper his freedom when he joined the military to fight for the Union during the Civil War.
“I don’t find it an obligatory connection. There are members of the family that say, as Henry Louis Gates says, guilt is not inheritable,” Pupke said. “But I also feel like there’s a story here to be told that needs to get out there, and somebody needs to tell it.”
He gives presentations at libraries and churches about the Black soldiers from his Maryland county who fought for the Union. And he sent documents to The Post to demonstrate that Brown belongs on the list of slaveholders.Georgia Sen. Augustus Octavius Bacon, who served from 1895 to 1914. (George Grantham Bain Collection/Library of Congress)
Mary Louisa Bacon Sturges saw her great-great-grandfather Augustus Octavius Bacon on The Post’s list of people to research. She had done some genealogy on her family, and sent documents showing that Bacon was a Georgia slaveholder as a young man — including letters that Bacon wrote home to his family during his time as a Confederate soldier, in which he wrote about an enslaved man named Richmond whom he brought to the battlefield with him and who became ill and died there.
Bacon’s addition to The Post’s database of slaveholders in Congress makes him one of the last former slaveholders to serve as a U.S. lawmaker — he represented Georgia in the Senate from 1895 to 1914. (He left his mark on the District by successfully campaigning to have the street named Georgia Avenue re-designated to its current location. In his home state, he has a county in his name.)
Other readers who wanted to contribute to The Post’s database researched congressmen who represented their home states. One Ramapo College class got to work researching several New York congressmen as a class assignment. Workers at Alabama’s state archives department searched for records from their state.
And for some, the database inspired their own projects. Sarah Cate Wolfson, a high school junior in New York City, started making a list of New York mayors who enslaved people, which she hopes to publish. Her father, who pointed out The Post’s article to Wolfson and inspired the 16-year-old to start her own project, once served as New York’s deputy mayor.
“It’s opened my eyes to how intrinsically linked New York and enslavement were,” Wolfson said. “I feel like you don’t need a street named after someone who owned slaves who you don’t even know about. There was a mayor named Richard Varick — I didn’t even know he existed before starting this. What’s the point of having a Varick Street if it’s tied to not a great person?”
Readers turned up many forms of records. Vera Cecelski, a 30-year-old manager of a historic site in Durham, N.C., sent wills and probate records demonstrating that several congressmen from her state were slaveholders. In one will, Rep. George Mumford’s aunt left him an enslaved girl named Flora. Mumford’s aunt left an enslaved woman named Dinah to another nephew. She wrote that if Dinah had future children, she wanted each of Dinah’s next four children to go to four different people among her beneficiaries.
David B. Mattern, a historian who lives inCharlottesville, said he spent more than 30 years editing the papers of James Madison, one of 12 American presidents who enslaved people. He pointed The Post toward a letter from Madison’s wife, Dolley, to her sister Anna, in which Dolley complained about her enslaved maid and asked about Anna’s.
“I would buy a maid but good ones are rare & as high as 8 & 900$— I should like to know what you gave for yours,” Dolley wrote. Along with an 1820 census that a Post journalist found, Madison’s letter helped demonstrate that Anna and her husband, Rep. Richard Cutts of Massachusetts, were slaveowners, adding Cutts to the database.An 1804 portrait of U.S. First Lady Dolley Madison by artist Gilbert Stuart. (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
By far the most prolific contributor has been Luke Voyles, a 26-year-old pursuing his PhD in history at the University of Alabama, who has identified 39 slaveholders and counting.
Voyles was already well-versed in methods of combing censuses and historical journals for his own dissertation research, which focuses on the Confederate veterans who became congressmen after the Civil War and the influence they had on the course of American civil rights.
The thought of a list of all the slaveholders in Congress had crossed his mind as he worked on his list of more than 300 Confederates who served in Congress. When he was reading the news last month and saw The Post article, he joked that his first thought was, “Gosh darn it, somebody did it.”
Voyles got interested in civil rights as a child in rural Missouri reading biographies of presidents, then studied African historyin college before turning his attention to the American South. He dove into helping with The Post’s project, often late at night after a day of teaching and working on his dissertation. He would turn on classical music from YouTube, then look at handwritten 19th-century documents until he found the name he was looking for.
“It was just a great way of trying to do the right thing, trying to do something ethical in my downtime,” he said. “When you do find the name, it’s a big rush. But also you know that you’ve done something that’s very meaningful.”
The Post’s original story said that slaveholders represented 37 states in Congress. Voyles has made that 38 states — he found an 1850 census demonstrating that Charles Debrille Poston, known as the “Father of Arizona” and its first delegate to Congress, was a slaveholder.
Adrian Blanco contributed to this story.
About this story
Story editing by Lynda Robinson, photo editing by Mark Gail and Mark Miller, graphics editing by Kevin Uhrmacher, copy editing by Anne Kenderdine, design by Leo Dominguez. Reader submissions managed by Teddy Amenabar.
How a rookie writer’s Reader’s Digest story spawned two monumental works of Black history
Alex Haley’s 1960 article led directly to ‘The Autobiography of Malcolm X’ and ‘Roots’
By Dave Kindy February 4, 2022 at 1:30 p.m. EST Washington Post
In March1960, a rookie reporter published a magazine article that would spark a historic shift in African American literature. Appearing in Reader’s Digest, “Mr. Muhammad Speaks” was an in-depth examination of the Nation of Islam, led by Elijah Muhammad, and its growing attraction to Black Americans.
The story itself was nothing groundbreaking, though it provided a balanced representation of the facts and offered insight into a movement that many White Americans found frightening. But for its author, it led directly to writing two of the most consequential works of Black history of the 20th century, books that would redefine American literature and change the way the country viewed race relations.
The writer was Alex Haley, who had just retired from the U.S. Coast Guard at age 39. Following the publication of the Nation of Islam story, he would co-author “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” and chronicle his own heritage in the fictionalized “Roots: The Saga of an American Family,” which became a groundbreaking and massively successful TV miniseries. Haley wrote both books while working at Reader’s Digest, which marks its 100th anniversary Saturday, and the publication funded his work on “Roots.”
“I read all of Alex Haley’s books before working at Reader’s Digest but was really surprised that I didn’t realize he was on staff here,” said Jason Buhrmester, the magazine’s chief content officer. “Reader’s Digest basically paid Haley for 12 years and covered all of his travel expenses to write ‘Roots.’ That book had such a big impact on America.”
Indeed, “Roots” was monumental as literature — it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1977 — and as a means for getting American society to examine the darker aspects of its history. The 1976 novel, based on Haley’s research into his ancestors’ origins in Africa and then in slavery, took the country by storm. It was number one on the New York Times bestseller list for 22 weeks and would have a lasting impact on generations of African Americans who wanted to know more about their forebears.
Haley’s depictions of the Middle Passage — the brutal forced transportation of enslaved people from Africa to America — would leave a mark on countless readers, including a young Henry Louis Gates Jr. The literary critic, historian, author and host of “Finding Your Roots” on PBS was profoundly changed when the book was printed in a condensed version by Reader’s Digest in 1974, two years before the full text was released by Doubleday.
“When I read the Reader’s Digest excerpts of ‘Roots’ in 1974, I was mesmerized — that’s the only word for it,” Gates wrote for the magazine’s centennial commemoration. He added: “I had a serious bout of envy toward Alex Haley. I wanted to be like him: I wanted to reverse the Middle Passage and find out where my ancestors were from in Africa, the motherland.”Press Enter to skip to end of carousel
“Roots” would also be revelatory for White Americans, who read the book and watched the miniseries by the tens of millions. Many would have their eyes opened to the uncomfortable reality that slavery was more than a “peculiar institution,” as Vice President John C. Calhoun had called it in 1830: It was a violent, vicious system of oppression based on racial indignity.
“Alex Haley later said that 99 percent of the letters he got were from White readers who said the book completely changed the way they viewed race relations in America,” Buhrmester said.
Published in 1965 following Malcolm X’s assassination, “The Autobiography” would have a similar impact on literature and society. Haley met the outspoken human rights activist while working on the article about the Nation of Islam. He interviewed Malcolm X several times for the piece and realized there was a bigger story in describing how the Muslim minister’s experiences with racism and bigotry shaped his character and fiery oratory.
Malcolm X speaks to reporters in D.C. on May 16, 1963. (AP)
Haley convinced Malcolm X to collaborate on the project. Haley wrote most of the book, toning down some of Malcolm X’s anger to make the text palatable to a wider audience.
Critics hailed “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” as a masterpiece in explaining the divide between White and Black America. The New York Times called it “brilliant, painful, important.” The book is now considered a classic, and its narrative would influence generations of writers and readers, who were beginning to view racism and civil rights through a new prism.
Unlike “Roots,” this book was not published by Reader’s Digest; Haley pursued it as an independent project, spurred on by his work on the Nation of Islam story — and the lessons he learned about writing in his early years at the magazine.
“In Haley, the editors found someone who could untangle sensitive topics in a way that was relatable,” Buhrmester said. “He could take someone controversial like a Malcolm X and get to the root of the thinking and the logic behind the person. Haley went by the maxim, ‘Find something good and praise it,’ which he picked up at Reader’s Digest. It was evident in all of his writing for the magazine.”
Though it’s sometimes seen today as a “grandma” magazine (in spite of its large global readership), Reader’s Digest was hugely influential in the 1950s and ’60s. As the highest-circulation magazine in the United States, it often influenced public opinion on such matters as communism, democracy, morality and values.
Haley started writing for Reader’s Digest as a freelancer in the 1950s. He joined the publication as a reporter in 1959 and eventually retired as a senior editor in 1991. He died the following year.
He was proud of his tenure at the magazine and acknowledged an “undying debt” for helping him succeed.
When the full version of his novel was published in 1977, Haley wrote an article for Reader’s Digest titled “What ‘Roots’ Means to Me.” He discussed its success as a book, its impact on race relations and the way it inspired millions of Americans of all creeds to learn about their origins.
“In this country, we have been like people who live in the same house and tend to stay in our own rooms, doing no more than peeking out and then ducking back,” he wrote. “If only we could all come out together, say in the living room, and learn more about each other, we couldn’t help but benefit. It would show us our future as a collective people — retaining, being proud of, our differences, but coming together in collective strength. That, I believe, is the hope for America.”
By Dave KindyFebruary 4, 2022 at 1:30 p.m. EST
In March1960, a rookie reporter published a magazine article that would spark a historic shift in African American literature. Appearing in Reader’s Digest, “Mr. Muhammad Speaks” was an in-depth examination of the Nation of Islam, led by Elijah Muhammad, and its growing attraction to Black Americans.
The story itself was nothing groundbreaking, though it provided a balanced representation of the facts and offered insight into a movement that many White Americans found frightening. But for its author, it led directly to writing two of the most consequential works of Black history of the 20th century, books that would redefine American literature and change the way the country viewed race relations.
The writer was Alex Haley, who had just retired from the U.S. Coast Guard at age 39. Following the publication of the Nation of Islam story, he would co-author “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” and chronicle his own heritage in the fictionalized “Roots: The Saga of an American Family,” which became a groundbreaking and massively successful TV miniseries. Haley wrote both books while working at Reader’s Digest, which marks its 100th anniversary Saturday, and the publication funded his work on “Roots.”
“I read all of Alex Haley’s books before working at Reader’s Digest but was really surprised that I didn’t realize he was on staff here,” said Jason Buhrmester, the magazine’s chief content officer. “Reader’s Digest basically paid Haley for 12 years and covered all of his travel expenses to write ‘Roots.’ That book had such a big impact on America.”
Indeed, “Roots” was monumental as literature — it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1977 — and as a means for getting American society to examine the darker aspects of its history. The 1976 novel, based on Haley’s research into his ancestors’ origins in Africa and then in slavery, took the country by storm. It was number one on the New York Times bestseller list for 22 weeks and would have a lasting impact on generations of African Americans who wanted to know more about their forebears.
Haley’s depictions of the Middle Passage — the brutal forced transportation of enslaved people from Africa to America — would leave a mark on countless readers, including a young Henry Louis Gates Jr. The literary critic, historian, author and host of “Finding Your Roots” on PBS was profoundly changed when the book was printed in a condensed version by Reader’s Digest in 1974, two years before the full text was released by Doubleday.
“When I read the Reader’s Digest excerpts of ‘Roots’ in 1974, I was mesmerized — that’s the only word for it,” Gates wrote for the magazine’s centennial commemoration. He added: “I had a serious bout of envy toward Alex Haley. I wanted to be like him: I wanted to reverse the Middle Passage and find out where my ancestors were from in Africa, the motherland.”Press Enter to skip to end of carousel
“Roots” would also be revelatory for White Americans, who read the book and watched the miniseries by the tens of millions. Many would have their eyes opened to the uncomfortable reality that slavery was more than a “peculiar institution,” as Vice President John C. Calhoun had called it in 1830: It was a violent, vicious system of oppression based on racial indignity.
“Alex Haley later said that 99 percent of the letters he got were from White readers who said the book completely changed the way they viewed race relations in America,” Buhrmester said.
Published in 1965 following Malcolm X’s assassination, “The Autobiography” would have a similar impact on literature and society. Haley met the outspoken human rights activist while working on the article about the Nation of Islam. He interviewed Malcolm X several times for the piece and realized there was a bigger story in describing how the Muslim minister’s experiences with racism and bigotry shaped his character and fiery oratory.
Malcolm X speaks to reporters in D.C. on May 16, 1963. (AP)
Haley convinced Malcolm X to collaborate on the project. Haley wrote most of the book, toning down some of Malcolm X’s anger to make the text palatable to a wider audience.
Critics hailed “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” as a masterpiece in explaining the divide between White and Black America. The New York Times called it “brilliant, painful, important.” The book is now considered a classic, and its narrative would influence generations of writers and readers, who were beginning to view racism and civil rights through a new prism.
Unlike “Roots,” this book was not published by Reader’s Digest; Haley pursued it as an independent project, spurred on by his work on the Nation of Islam story — and the lessons he learned about writing in his early years at the magazine.
“In Haley, the editors found someone who could untangle sensitive topics in a way that was relatable,” Buhrmester said. “He could take someone controversial like a Malcolm X and get to the root of the thinking and the logic behind the person. Haley went by the maxim, ‘Find something good and praise it,’ which he picked up at Reader’s Digest. It was evident in all of his writing for the magazine.”
Though it’s sometimes seen today as a “grandma” magazine (in spite of its large global readership), Reader’s Digest was hugely influential in the 1950s and ’60s. As the highest-circulation magazine in the United States, it often influenced public opinion on such matters as communism, democracy, morality and values.
Haley started writing for Reader’s Digest as a freelancer in the 1950s. He joined the publication as a reporter in 1959 and eventually retired as a senior editor in 1991. He died the following year.
He was proud of his tenure at the magazine and acknowledged an “undying debt” for helping him succeed.
When the full version of his novel was published in 1977, Haley wrote an article for Reader’s Digest titled “What ‘Roots’ Means to Me.” He discussed its success as a book, its impact on race relations and the way it inspired millions of Americans of all creeds to learn about their origins.
“In this country, we have been like people who live in the same house and tend to stay in our own rooms, doing no more than peeking out and then ducking back,” he wrote. “If only we could all come out together, say in the living room, and learn more about each other, we couldn’t help but benefit. It would show us our future as a collective people — retaining, being proud of, our differences, but coming together in collective strength. That, I believe, is the hope for America.”
By Dave Kindy February 4, 2022 at 1:30 p.m. ES Washington Post
In March1960, a rookie reporter published a magazine article that would spark a historic shift in African American literature. Appearing in Reader’s Digest, “Mr. Muhammad Speaks” was an in-depth examination of the Nation of Islam, led by Elijah Muhammad, and its growing attraction to Black Americans.
The story itself was nothing groundbreaking, though it provided a balanced representation of the facts and offered insight into a movement that many White Americans found frightening. But for its author, it led directly to writing two of the most consequential works of Black history of the 20th century, books that would redefine American literature and change the way the country viewed race relations.
The writer was Alex Haley, who had just retired from the U.S. Coast Guard at age 39. Following the publication of the Nation of Islam story, he would co-author “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” and chronicle his own heritage in the fictionalized “Roots: The Saga of an American Family,” which became a groundbreaking and massively successful TV miniseries. Haley wrote both books while working at Reader’s Digest, which marks its 100th anniversary Saturday, and the publication funded his work on “Roots.”
“I read all of Alex Haley’s books before working at Reader’s Digest but was really surprised that I didn’t realize he was on staff here,” said Jason Buhrmester, the magazine’s chief content officer. “Reader’s Digest basically paid Haley for 12 years and covered all of his travel expenses to write ‘Roots.’ That book had such a big impact on America.”
Indeed, “Roots” was monumental as literature — it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1977 — and as a means for getting American society to examine the darker aspects of its history. The 1976 novel, based on Haley’s research into his ancestors’ origins in Africa and then in slavery, took the country by storm. It was number one on the New York Times bestseller list for 22 weeks and would have a lasting impact on generations of African Americans who wanted to know more about their forebears.
Haley’s depictions of the Middle Passage — the brutal forced transportation of enslaved people from Africa to America — would leave a mark on countless readers, including a young Henry Louis Gates Jr. The literary critic, historian, author and host of “Finding Your Roots” on PBS was profoundly changed when the book was printed in a condensed version by Reader’s Digest in 1974, two years before the full text was released by Doubleday.
“When I read the Reader’s Digest excerpts of ‘Roots’ in 1974, I was mesmerized — that’s the only word for it,” Gates wrote for the magazine’s centennial commemoration. He added: “I had a serious bout of envy toward Alex Haley. I wanted to be like him: I wanted to reverse the Middle Passage and find out where my ancestors were from in Africa, the motherland.”Press Enter to skip to end of carousel
“Roots” would also be revelatory for White Americans, who read the book and watched the miniseries by the tens of millions. Many would have their eyes opened to the uncomfortable reality that slavery was more than a “peculiar institution,” as Vice President John C. Calhoun had called it in 1830: It was a violent, vicious system of oppression based on racial indignity.
“Alex Haley later said that 99 percent of the letters he got were from White readers who said the book completely changed the way they viewed race relations in America,” Buhrmester said.
Published in 1965 following Malcolm X’s assassination, “The Autobiography” would have a similar impact on literature and society. Haley met the outspoken human rights activist while working on the article about the Nation of Islam. He interviewed Malcolm X several times for the piece and realized there was a bigger story in describing how the Muslim minister’s experiences with racism and bigotry shaped his character and fiery oratory.
Malcolm X speaks to reporters in D.C. on May 16, 1963. (AP)
Haley convinced Malcolm X to collaborate on the project. Haley wrote most of the book, toning down some of Malcolm X’s anger to make the text palatable to a wider audience.
Critics hailed “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” as a masterpiece in explaining the divide between White and Black America. The New York Times called it “brilliant, painful, important.” The book is now considered a classic, and its narrative would influence generations of writers and readers, who were beginning to view racism and civil rights through a new prism.
Unlike “Roots,” this book was not published by Reader’s Digest; Haley pursued it as an independent project, spurred on by his work on the Nation of Islam story — and the lessons he learned about writing in his early years at the magazine.
“In Haley, the editors found someone who could untangle sensitive topics in a way that was relatable,” Buhrmester said. “He could take someone controversial like a Malcolm X and get to the root of the thinking and the logic behind the person. Haley went by the maxim, ‘Find something good and praise it,’ which he picked up at Reader’s Digest. It was evident in all of his writing for the magazine.”
Though it’s sometimes seen today as a “grandma” magazine (in spite of its large global readership), Reader’s Digest was hugely influential in the 1950s and ’60s. As the highest-circulation magazine in the United States, it often influenced public opinion on such matters as communism, democracy, morality and values.
Haley started writing for Reader’s Digest as a freelancer in the 1950s. He joined the publication as a reporter in 1959 and eventually retired as a senior editor in 1991. He died the following year.
He was proud of his tenure at the magazine and acknowledged an “undying debt” for helping him succeed.
When the full version of his novel was published in 1977, Haley wrote an article for Reader’s Digest titled “What ‘Roots’ Means to Me.” He discussed its success as a book, its impact on race relations and the way it inspired millions of Americans of all creeds to learn about their origins.
“In this country, we have been like people who live in the same house and tend to stay in our own rooms, doing no more than peeking out and then ducking back,” he wrote. “If only we could all come out together, say in the living room, and learn more about each other, we couldn’t help but benefit. It would show us our future as a collective people — retaining, being proud of, our differences, but coming together in collective strength. That, I believe, is the hope for America.”
Opinion: Friendship Heights has a chance to begin to rectify its racist past
By Aaron L. Alexander, Ledlie Laughlin, Hannah Goldstein, Doug Robinson-Johnson and Molly Blythe Teichert February 18, 2022 at 10:00 a.m. EST Washington Post
Aaron L. Alexander is a rabbi at Adas Israel Congregation. Ledlie Laughlin is a pastor at St. Columba’s Episcopal Church. Hannah Goldstein is a rabbi at Temple Sinai. Doug Robinson-Johnson is a pastor at National United Methodist Church. Molly Blythe Teichert is a pastor at Chevy Chase Presbyterian Church. The writers lead congregations that are members of the Washington Interfaith Network and the Washington Interfaith Network Ward 3 Congregations Affordable Housing Work Group.O
This year, city planners, residents and landowners will come together to consider the future of Friendship Heights — the area around Wisconsin Avenue NW and the Maryland border. That effort, led by the Office of Planning as part of an extensive planning exercise for commercial corridors in Rock Creek West, should be driven by the need to repair past wrongs and to move toward a more equitable and dynamic future.
The area draws its name from a 3,124-acre parcel — Friendship — granted by Charles Calvert to James Stoddert and Thomas Addison in 1713. The name reflected the friendship of the families. Much of Friendship remained sleepy until the early 1900s and the arrival of the streetcar.
Infrastructure investments always shape residential development, and the early D.C. streetcars were no exception. They launched an era of “suburban” development in upper Northwest, including Friendship Heights, in the first half of the 20th century.
Housing opportunities in upper Northwest in that era were reserved for White people; African Americans were actively excluded and, where present, were effectively expelled at places such as Reno between Woodrow Wilson High School and Alice Deal Middle School and the area around Lafayette Elementary School.
Meanwhile, the Friendship Heights area, as outlined in the extraordinary scholarship of Neil Flanagan and Kimberly Bender, offered a tantalizing glimpse of what might have been and now must be. In 1906, four bold African American men — Alexander Satterwhite, Michel Dumas, James Neill and Charles Cuney — formed the Belmont Syndicate and purchased a parcel of land on the Maryland side of Friendship Heights. They marketed lots to both White and African American purchasers.
In the area known as Friendship, the response was anything but friendly. One White resident explained:No Negro shall ever build a house at Belmont. I speak for 500 men as determined as myself. We do not care what methods are needed to prevent a calamity which appears to be impending. Whatever they are those methods will be taken. To establish a negro colony at Belmont, practically at our doors and beyond the restraint of the District police force, would mean the impairment of our property values, a constant menace to our peace and security and the destruction of the happiness of our homes.
The Belmont Syndicate’s visionary effort was ultimately foiled, and the area remained, as it was intended to be by Francis Newlands and his Chevy Chase Land Company, segregated and affluent. Newlands, who tried to strip African Americans of the vote and casually referred to African Americans as a “race of children,” opined:History teaches that it is impossible to make homogenous people by the juxtaposition upon the same soil of races differing in color. Race tolerance, under such conditions, means, ultimately, race war and mutual destruction or the reduction of one race to servitude.
Sadly, in the first half of the 20th century, Newlands’s segregated, economically exclusive vision became a reality.
Even today, few African Americans make their home in Friendship Heights (or many of the neighborhoods of upper Northwest). Today’s residents of Friendship Heights do not hold the views of their predecessors 100 years ago, but the die of racial and economic segregation cast in the first half of the 20th century remains.
We come from different faith traditions, but we share an obligation to revisit the past to understand more fully our present and seed a different future. A future that, though recognizing our differences, transparently honors our shared humanity. For the moral fiber of any community is not necessarily determined by what its members believe in private (though that’s important), but by who and what its policies promote in public. Where there is a wrong, we are obligated to fix it. Where there is an opportunity to do right, we want to seize it.
And, happily, in Friendship Heights we have such an opportunity. The upcoming planning process offers a moment for repair. Friendship Heights became what it is today through concerted action. And concerted action is required now to create opportunities for African Americans as the Belmont Syndicate sought to do more than 100 years ago.
Over the years, there has been significant opposition to change in Friendship Heights. In the coming planning process, we hope neighbors and landowners will embrace change and together bend the arc. It is imperative that any resulting plan significantly move off the status quo.
Our planners must call for using public lands to build affordable housing and maximizing affordable housing on private land. We must provide affordable housing for teachers, firefighters, police and other hard-working Washingtonians who want to live in Friendship Heights and enjoy its plentiful amenities, as well as deeply affordable homes for those who labor in the upper Northwest’s retail and service sectors. We also need to create opportunities for homeownership for African Americans as part of redressing decades of purposeful exclusion.
Failure to dramatically break from the status quo is to tacitly endorse it. To us, that’s unacceptable. What we need is to embrace friendship not only in our hearts but with our hands as well.
A meaningful life is possible amid suffering, some therapists say
Acceptance and commitment therapy teaches people to acknowledge their negative feelings instead of trying to resist or wrestle with them
By Katherine Kam February 19, 2022 at 9:00 a.m. EST Washington Post
Emily Sandoz, a psychologist in Louisiana, has witnessed clients’ grueling struggles during the pandemic. Many said they felt trapped and deprived of their usual ways of coping. Others began therapy for the first time after the pause in their busy lives forced some existential questions: “Do any of these things that I used to put all this energy into even matter? Does my job even matter? Do my relationships matter?”F
Then, she said, her clients felt guilty.
“I know that this has been stressful for everyone, but . . .”
“I just feel like I should be able to handle this.”
“I know what I need to do, but I’m just not doing it.”
It’s natural to feel distress during such a harrowing time, Sandoz tells them, but even in the midst of inevitable pain and hardship, people can still live meaningful lives aligned with their highest values.
Sandoz provides a form of behavioral therapy called acceptance and commitment therapy, or ACT. Psychologists consider it a third-wave therapy after traditional behavior therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy. Infused with mindfulness concepts, ACT acknowledges that suffering is part of the human condition and guides people in becoming “psychologically flexible” to navigate life’s ups and downs and keep moving forward.
“Traditionally, most people think about psychological wellness in terms of the absence of something — the absence of a painful feeling, the absence of a painful memory,” said Sandoz, who is also a psychology professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. When people struggle, they believe it’s abnormal, she said.
ACT, pronounced like the word “act,” defines emotional health differently. “Psychological flexibility is really how we in ACT conceptualize psychological wellness,” Sandoz said. “What we mean by that is people being able to live their lives meaningfully and effectively, regardless of what they’re thinking or feeling, regardless of what memories are coming up, regardless of how they’re thinking of themselves, regardless of how much anxiety they may be experiencing or sadness or hopelessness.”
Steven C. Hayes, a psychology professor at the University of Nevada, originated ACT during the 1980s, but it still hasn’t fully entered the public consciousness. Research has shown that it can work to treat anxiety, depression, substance abuse, pain and other conditions. In one review of 36 randomized, controlled trials, ACT proved as effective as cognitive behavioral therapy in treating anxiety and depression, specifically by increasing psychological flexibility.
ACT diverges significantly from the rest of Western psychotherapy, which tends to label negative emotions as symptoms or problems to overcome. ACT teaches acceptance of negative feelings instead of trying to resist or wrestle with them.
While life has moments of joy, it’s unrealistic to expect happiness all the time, ACT experts say. Indeed, Americans’ love affair with the happiness myth — that we should constantly strive for positivity, productivity, success and a pleasurable life — started to feel hollow for many during the pandemic.
But people who feel unhappy or pressured can still take purposeful action, said Judy Ho, an associate professor of psychology at Pepperdine University in Southern California. “Even if that stress is intense, you don’t have to wait until things get better to do the things that are meaningful to you.”
Those with long-standing anxiety, depression, thoughts of self-harm or suicide, or other serious issues should consider working with a mental health professional who can lead them through ACT or provide other treatment, Ho said.
Tips on using ACT techniques
Many people can try using ACT approaches on their own, however. Three experts offered these tips:
Learn to accept all of your emotions.
Trying to control or suppress difficult emotions often doesn’t work and might even worsen distress in the long run, ACT experts say. ACT aims to help people accept (but not necessarily approve of) all of their emotions instead of avoiding or grappling with them.
That’s in contrast with cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which seeks to help people identify and change negative or inaccurate thinking. While CBT can be quite effective, it didn’t suit Jennifer Gregg, a psychology professor at San José State University who said that she uses ACT in her own life. “That’s how I manage my own tough moments,” she said.
“A lot of what traditional psychotherapy approaches do is try to help you see the distortions in your thought processes or the ways that you might be thinking yourself into a corner,” she said. “All of the logic I could bring to the way I was thinking really didn’t change what I was feeling that much, and it didn’t really help me think about what I wanted to do differently next.”
By defining what gives her life meaning, she can “move toward those things rather than spending all of my time trying to control my thoughts and feelings,” she said.
Avoiding one’s emotions also can be counterproductive and lead to misuse of alcohol or drugs, Ho said.
ACT doesn’t aim expressly to eliminate bad feelings, but to help people open up to all of their emotional experiences to live more effectively, Sandoz said.
“Most people who come to therapy want me to help them get rid of something: painful memories, hard thoughts, difficult feelings. But that is not what I do,” she said. Instead, she tells them: “We are going to intentionally look at and welcome in those difficult experiences. We’re going to talk about things that bring up painful memories. We’re going to talk about things that bring up those hard, existential questions. And when we do that, we’ll then be practicing being with that experience in a different way.”
Sandoz said she hopes that clients will move from a rigid, debilitating thought, for example, “I want to go to college, but I’m too anxious about it,” to a more expansive and psychologically flexible one: “I want to go to college, and I’m anxious about it.” With the latter, a person can more readily accept her anxiety and start taking concrete steps toward attending college.
Change your relationship with your negative thoughts.
Most people look at the world from their thoughts and believe that everything they think must be true, Ho said. ACT teaches people to look at their thoughts as a mental event. Thoughts don’t always reflect reality. Instead of telling oneself, “I’m worthless,” a person can say, “I’m having a thought that I’m worthless.”
That small linguistic cue can create some healthy distance.
“Those thoughts and feelings are not you,” Gregg said. “I can just notice that these are feelings and that they are separate from me. From that stance, I might be able to let them come in, let them be there without needing to solve or reduce them or make them go away.”
When people step back to observe a thought, the notion might simply pass on its own, leaving them less likely to be consumed by it, Ho said.
In contrast, when a person gets entangled in a negative thought, “it tends to dominate everything,” Sandoz said. “It’ll feel like I have to do something here. I have to make this anxiety go away, or I have to prove to this person how right I am.”
ACT therapists also speak of an “observing self,” which can sound abstract, but refers to an abiding, detached awareness that notices and watches events unfolding in one’s own life. Ho, who counsels clients using ACT, said, “The observing self is much like an audience watching a play, where they care about the story, but they’re not so attached to it. Yet they’re still engaged in that conversation.”
By taking time to observe what’s going on externally and internally (how one is thinking and feeling), people can decide how to proceed more thoughtfully, the experts say.
Clarify your values and take committed action toward a meaningful life.
ACT doesn’t aim to only increase psychological flexibility. It also emphasizes the pursuit of a meaningful life in accordance with one’s most cherished values, Ho said.
Choosing one’s values creates a north star to guide the journey. “Values clarification is about really connecting to who I want to be today,” Gregg said. “What matters to me? What difference do I want to make?”
People select values that give their lives inherent meaning. Those values might include creativity, compassion, faith, rewarding relationships, knowledge, mentoring and professional accomplishment, among many others.
Values must be connected to concrete goals that flow from them. “If you just think about your values, it can be a little stressful unless you tie it to really specific actions and things that you know how to do,” said Gregg, who has done research on ACT.
For starters, someone who prizes community can text a relative who isn’t doing well, Gregg said. A person who seeks knowledge can start reading a periodical that offers fresh perspectives.
The ultimate goal is to move toward “bigger or more extended patterns of action that we might call valued action or committed actions — these larger goals that are connected to very clear purposes,” Sandoz said.
Sandoz knows that it can be tough to pursue goals fully during the pandemic.
“Sometimes, the only action that we see is the biggest perfect behavior that we can engage in and that feels so far away and so overwhelming and it can be hard to get moving at all,” she said. “So I encourage people to start with the most simple needs,” including taking care of one’s physical needs.
“The world is different today,” Sandoz said. Sometimes, “the only thing that we can do is add to our learning. That’s what healing is.”
If people are struggling, Sandoz said, they can ask themselves: “‘Okay, the learning I’ve had so far didn’t prepare me for this. What new learning can I offer myself? What new experiences can I give myself?”
When people take steps despite their distress, they might start feeling better as a byproduct, Ho said.
During the pandemic, ACT therapists have seen clients move in novel directions. Some have questioned their former values, including career success. New values are trending, including spirituality, community, social justice and adventure.
There’s a greater sense of urgency, too, Sandoz said.
“Some people are recognizing values that maybe they’ve always had on the back burner,” she said. “It always felt like they’d get around to it at some point, and suddenly, it feels like, ‘Oh, this is right now. People are dying. If I want this to happen, I really need to acknowledge and admit this value now.’”
Last year more than 5,200 Americans of all ages and backgrounds united to meet local needs, strengthen communities, and expand opportunity through national service in Maryland. AmeriCorps invested more than $18 million in federal funding to support cost-effective community solutions, working hand in hand with local partners to empower individuals to help communities tackle their toughest challenges.
AmeriCorps members and AmeriCorps Seniors volunteers are preparing today’s students for tomorrow’s jobs, helping communities and families impacted by COVID-19, connecting veterans to services, fighting the opioid epidemic, helping seniors live independently, rebuilding communities after disasters, and leading conservation and climate change efforts.
AmeriCorps members and AmeriCorps Seniors volunteers served at more than 700 locations across Maryland, including schools, food banks, homeless shelters, health clinics, youth centers, veterans facilities, and other nonprofit and faith-based organizations. Through a unique public-private partnership, AmeriCorps and its partners generated more than $8.6 million in outside resources from businesses, foundations, public agencies, and other sources in Maryland last year. This local support strengthened community impact and increased the return on taxpayer dollars.
Our Programs and Initiatives
AmeriCorps State and National awards grants to organizations to engage individuals in sustained service to address local, regional, and national challenges. Thousands of opportunities exist in locations across the country to serve with nonprofits, schools, public agencies, tribes, and community and faith-based groups. Most AmeriCorps grant funding goes to Maryland Governor’s Office on Service and Volunteerism, the Governor-appointed State Service Commission, which in turn awards grants to organizations to respond to local needs.
AmeriCorps VISTA places individuals with nonprofit organizations, public agencies, and tribal governments to expand reach and deepen impact in making sustainable change that alleviates the impact of poverty. Through fundraising, volunteer recruitment, program development, and more, AmeriCorps members gain experience and leadership skills that put them on track for a life of service in the public, private, or nonprofit sector.
AmeriCorps NCCC is a full-time, team-based, residential program for 18–26-year-olds. Whether building homes for families in need or accelerating our nation’s capacity to respond to a crisis, AmeriCorps NCCC members engage in a variety of community identified projects during their service term, while developing leadership, teamwork, and professional skills. AmeriCorps NCCC FEMA Corps serves communities, in coordination with FEMA, through disaster preparedness, response, and recovery.
AmeriCorps Seniors Foster Grandparents provides grants to organizations to engage low-income Americans aged 55 and older in providing one-on-one mentoring and academic support to children with special or exceptional needs. In 2020, Foster Grandparents in Maryland served more than 1590 young people with special needs.
AmeriCorps Seniors Senior Companions provides grants to organizations to engage low-income Americans aged 55 and older in providing supportive, individualized services to help homebound seniors and other adults maintain their dignity and independence. In 2020, Seniors Companions in Maryland provided independent living support to more than 120 individuals.
AmeriCorps Seniors RSVP provides grants to organizations to engage Americans aged 55 and older in tutoring and mentoring youth, responding to natural disasters, supporting veterans and their families, and meeting other critical needs.
Volunteer Generation Fund supports voluntary organizations and state service commissions in boosting the impact of volunteers in addressing critical community needs.
MLK Day of Service is observed each year on the third Monday in January. It is the only federal holiday designated as a national day of service to encourage all Americans to volunteer to deepen ties to communities, expand racial equity, and solidify service to others as a national commitment.
9/11 Day of Service calls Americans across the country to volunteer in their local communities in tribute to the individuals lost and injured in the attacks, first responders, and the many who have risen in service to defend freedom since Sept. 11, 2001.
Learn More
To see other reports about national service in Maryland, email MD@cns.gov.
A school principal’s blunt warning: We can’t pretend the pandemic is over
January 28, 2022 6:00 AM ET NPR Kids are carrying the trauma of the pandemic and, even if COVID is eventually defanged, it has already left indelible marks on students’ psyches and education.
That’s the warning of Chicago school principal, Seth Lavin.
As the pandemic has disrupted education across the country, the situation in Chicago has been particularly acute. The city’s public school system shut down for five days earlier this month as the teachers union and city officials were in a standoff over COVID safety rules.
“Our schools are not OK. Children are not OK. Teachers are not OK,” Lavin wrote in a recent commentary for the Chicago Sun-Times. “Yesterday we COVID-tested a line of students 300 children long. But this surreal circus is not the main plot of this year. The surge is ending. The crisis will still be here.”
Lavin, who heads the Brentano Elementary Math & Science Academy (Pre-K – 8th grade), spoke with NPR’s All Things Considered.
The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Members of the Chicago Teachers Union and their supporters participate in a car caravan around City Hall to protest against in-person learning in Chicago public schools on January 10, 2022 in Chicago, Illinois.Scott Olson/Getty Images
What’s not OK?
We’ve all been through so much in the past two years. Most of last year we were apart and now we’re together again. Children and all of us are out of practice being a community. We’ve all lost a lot. We’ve all been hurt a lot. So, the children need help. They need love. The adults need help and love too. And so as a community, we’re struggling through it.
How children carry the burdens of COVID
Principal Seth Lavin.Seth Lavin
Kids have experienced loss and kids have lost experiences. They are carrying trauma and, even the ones who aren’t carrying trauma from really terrible things happening during this pandemic, they’ve had experiences that kids shouldn’t have and have lacked experiences that kids should have.
Their friendships are harder. Their emotions are bigger. Their ability to have empathy, and process with those around them, and notice the humans around them is lower. And that just makes everything more challenging in a school because, in a school, we are together and everything we do impacts the people around us directly.
I talk to friends of mine who are teachers, who are principals, and we all share these stories, just examples of things that worry us about our kids – stories that you wouldn’t hear two or three years ago. A friend of mine who’s a principal told me when I asked how she’s doing, she said in the last three years, she had once gone through the process that you go through when a child has suicidal ideation, when they talk a lot about self-harm. She said [she has] done it four times in the last one month.
A student arrives for classes at a Chicago elementary school on January 12, 2022.Scott Olson/Getty Images
Too much focus on learning loss
It is objectively true that over the last two years, kids have not experienced the same lessons they would have, if school had just been in person. But, I really think there’s too much focus on that or on this idea of learning loss, whatever that means.
What school does and what school is isn’t just a sequence of lessons that you’re supposed to get in order at the right time in order to grow up to be the person you’re supposed to grow up to be. That’s not what school is really about. School is about becoming the person you’re meant to be through being in community and having experiences with others, learning who you are, learning how to be a person who shows up in a way that is good for others – and fractions and grammar.
So, yes, our kids missed out on things. They have experiences that they need to have, now, to grow into the people they need to be and to grow in community in the right way. That is all much more important and much more urgent than this idea that we need to somehow make up for the lessons that they didn’t have because they were remote or because school was closed at a certain period of time. That stuff will come. The urgency is we need to help our kids feel safe and good in community at school, so they know how to be with others.
When will things get back to normal?
We can’t pretend that we’re not still in the present tense in the pandemic, and I think it’s important to say that out loud because when we pretend the pandemic is over, when we pretend that these disruptions aren’t still existing in school, when we pretend our kids aren’t still experiencing the hardship that they’re experiencing as a result of this pandemic, we aren’t opening our eyes to what kids and teachers and schools and parents are actually experiencing, and in doing so, we create a disconnect and we make things worse.
I’m an optimist. I think the omicron surge ending is a really good thing and it may mean we have a time of lower cases and normalcy for a while. That’ll give us a longer time of more calm and more stability and school, which is going to help kids and teachers feel more calm and more stable in their bodies and their classrooms to rebuild the community and do the work that we need to do.
But in the long term, this isn’t a blip. I mean, this is now part of our collective experience. It’s been a quarter of my younger son’s life. It’s not just a thing that happened. It’s the world. So, we’re going to be making sense of that forever.
We want to go back to normal, but we also always have to ask what normal even was. This moment, cataclysmic as it is, has to be a time when we rebuild the world in a better way. And I really think that people, schools, teachers and their kids and the parents they work with are doing that work classroom by classroom.
By Brian Broome Contributing columnist February 13, 2022 at 8:00 a.m. EST Washington Post
It’s disheartening to watch the idols from my youth turn into old grumps. Reading Sean Penn’s recent comment that too many men have become “feminized” reminded me that some people struggle with change. But I know that, at 51, I am also out of step, and that many of my ideas are old-fashioned. And I rediscover this on an almost daily basis. How could it be otherwise? I work with predominantly younger people who are more than happy to remind me.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.
Not long ago, Betty White came up in conversation with a 22-year-old colleague. I was speaking reverently about White when I noticed the blank look on my colleague’s face. It was instantly clear to me that she had no idea who White was apart from an elderly actor who recently died. So, I told her about “The Golden Girls,”insisted that she watch it, told her where to find it and then assured her she would find it hilarious.
When I asked her about it a few days later, her face maintained the same blank expression it had before. She said she’d watched a few episodes and was “turned off” by the “slut shaming” and the “fat jokes.” She found them cruel. She didn’t understand how women could claim to be friends with one another and yet criticize each other’s physical appearances repeatedly.
I wanted to argue with her but stopped short because of one unbending reality: The culture changes. As it does, the roles of women and men change. Attitudes about what is funny and what is not also change.
Inspired by my colleague, I took the opportunity to review some of my favorite shows from the ’90s and saw it instantly: Much of the comedy, for lack of a better word, was mean-spirited. What was often considered funny a decade or two ago seems callous today.
I was reminded, too, of those sketches on “Saturday Night Live,” played by the actor Julia Sweeney in the early 1990s, about a person named Pat. The premise of the sketches was that no one could tell whether Pat was male or female; in every “Pat” skit, some outsider would go to great lengths trying to discern Pat’s sex. I didn’t think the gag was particularly funny. But I wasn’t offended by it, either. I just never thought about it.
I know now that there are human beings who endure this sort of mockery every day. It’s not at all comical to them. It can, in fact, be life-threatening.
These changes in our culture can be a test for people like me. Many older Americans can be quick to say how soft and sensitive younger Americans are. How they can’t take a joke and how we fear for the future in their delicate hands. But there is another way to think about this. Perhaps we older folks are mistaking the younger generation’s kindness for weakness. Being inclusive isn’t the same as being gullible. And there are plenty of ways to be funny without being mean.
You can dismiss young people as “too woke” if you want. But culture changes, and you can’t stop it.
Turning this around, it is often hard for younger people to understand how getting older is at times deeply disorienting. It often feels as though the earth is shifting constantly under your feet; things that were once perfectly acceptable can turn harmful. Getting older, I’m learning, can often seem as though much of the world is trying to push you out. You can feel the ground you once knew slipping away.
And, just like that, you find yourself out of step: In the past few years, I have been accused of sizeism, ableism and sexism for things that I’ve said and written that were once part of my daily vocabulary. The criticism angered me. If felt as though I was being called a bad person.
Many of us are experiencing some version of this as we age. We’re finding out that the old standards that we used to go by don’t apply anymore. And that the groups of people we used to make sport of want their full humanity to be respected.
Attitudes change. Language changes. At times, it can be a lot to understand. And it leaves me with two choices. I can try to learn the ways that our culture and our country are changing. And work to accept them with grace. Or I could rail against the sunrise every morning — and turn into an old grump myself.
Sometimes someone else’s inspired words give us the courage to speak or to claim an insight that we felt was a bit outside the norm, until we find that someone else more famous said the same thing. Read this collection of quotations from speakers as diverse as Albert Einstein and Amelia Earhart, and be inspired.
My eyes already touch the sunny hill. going far beyond the road I have begun, So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp; it has an inner light, even from a distance-
and changes us, even if we do not reach it, into something else, which, hardly sensing it, we already are; a gesture waves us on answering our own wave… but what we feel is the wind in our faces. Rilke
“What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war; something heroic that will speak to man as universally as war does, and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved to be incompatible.” William James (1842-1910)
The end of all knowledge should be service to others. Cesar Chavez
“The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between, the leader is a servant.” –Max DePree
“You become what you think about all day long.”― Ralph Waldo Emerson
“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” Mahatma Gandhi
“Leadership is meaning making in a community of practice.” Wilfrid Drath
“The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.“ William Gibson
“You don’t grow up. You grow yourself up.” Student at Mazeond College
“Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent. ” John Maynard Keynes
” Those who carry a new story and who risk speaking it abroad have played a crucial role in times of historic shifts. Before a new era can come into form, there must be a new story. The playwright Arthur Miller noted that we know an era has ended when its basic illusions have been exhausted. I would add that these basic illusions not only are exhausted, but also have become exhausting. As they fail to produce the results we want, we just repeat them with greater desperation, plummeting ourselves into cynicism and despair as we lock into these cycles of failure. ” Margaret Wheatley
“HOPE- Either we have hope within us or we do not. It is a dimension of the soul and is not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world. HOPE is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. It transcends the world that is immediately experienced and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. HOPE in this deep and powerful sense is not the same as joy that things are going well or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good, not because it stands a chance to succeed. HOPE is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out. It is HOPE, above all which gives the strength to live and continually try new things. ” Vaclav Havel
“Pity the leader caught between unloving critics and uncritical lovers” John Gardner
“After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.”― Terry Eagleton
“The worst evil is not to commit crimes, but to fail to do the good one might have done.”― Leon Bloy
“It takes courage to grow up and turn out to be who you really are.” E E Cummings
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back” John Maynard Keynes
“People don’t resist change. They resist being changed.”― Peter Senge
“We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us, and do not think of the only one that does; so vain that we dream of times that are not and blindly flee the only one that is. The fact is that the present usually hurts. We thrust it out of sight because it distresses us, and if we find it enjoyable, we are sorry to see it slip away. We try to give it the support of the future, and think how we are going to arrange things over which we have no control for a time we can never be sure of reaching.
Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.” Pascal
“Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.” –Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History
“The same strength which has extended our power beyond a continent has also interwoven our destiny with the destiny of many peoples and brought us into a vast web of history in which other wills, running in oblique or contrasting directions to our own, inevitably hinder or contradict what we most fervently desire. We cannot simply have our way, not even when we believe our way to have the “happiness of mankind” as its promise.” ― Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History
“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” — Frederick Buechner.
“Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.”— Orson Scott Card
“It is necessary to remember, as we think critically about domination, that we all have the capacity to act in ways that oppress, dominate, wound (whether or not that power is institutionalized). It is necessary to remember that it is first the potential oppressor within that we must resist – the potential victim within that we must rescue – otherwise we cannot hope for an end to domination, for liberation.”― bell hooks,
“For this was the other thing that Elric knew: that to compromise with Tyranny is always to be destroyed by it. The sanest and most logical choice lay always in resistance.”― Michael Moorcock
“I can think of few important movements for reform in which success was won by any method other than that of an energetic minority presenting the indifferent majority with a fait accompli, which was then accepted.” Vera Brittain
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” Margaret Mead
“Let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped.” Carl Sagan
“I write these words to bear witness to the primacy of resistance struggle in any situation of domination (even within family life); to the strength and power that emerges from sustained resistance and the profound conviction that these forces can be healing, can protect us from dehumanization and despair.”― bell hooks,
“An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted… A retreat began from the old confidence in reason itself; nothing any longer could be what it seemed… A sort of political surrealism came dancing through the ruins of what had nearly been a beautifully moral and rational world… The whole place was becoming inhuman, not only because an unaccustomed fear was spreading so fast, but more because nobody would admit to being afraid.” (Arthur Miller 1974: 30, 32, 36)
“The highest reward for a person’s toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it.” –John Ruskin
“Persistence wears down resistance.”― William J Federer,
“Every man who begets a free act projects his personality into the infinite. If he gives a poor man a penny grudgingly, that penny pierces the poor man’s hand, falls, pierces the earth, bores holes in suns, crosses the firmament and compromises the universe. If he begets an impure act, he perhaps darkens thousands of hearts whom he does not know, who are mysteriously linked to him, and who need this man to be pure as a traveler dying of thirst needs the Gospel’s draught of water. A charitable act, an impulse of real pity sings for him the divine praises, from the time of Adam to the end of the ages; it cures the sick, consoles those in despair, calms storms, ransoms prisoners, converts the infidel and protects mankind”― Léon Bloy, Pilgrim of the Absolute
“The kind of hope I often think about (especially in hopeless situations like prison or the sewer) is, I believe, a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don’t. Hope is not a prognostication — it’s an orientation of the spirit. Each of us must find real, fundamental hope within himself. You can’t delegate that to anyone else.
Hope in this deep and powerful sense is not the same as joy when things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but rather an ability to work for something to succeed. Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It’s not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.
It is this hope, above all, that gives us strength to live and to continually try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now. In the face of this absurdity, life is too precious a thing to permit its devaluation by living pointlessly, emptily, without meaning, without love, and, finally, without hope.” –Vaclav Havel
“Let us seek the respite where it is—in the very thick of battle. For in my opinion, and this is where I shall close, it is there. Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear, amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope. Some will say that this hope lies in a nation; others, in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished by millions of solitary individuals whose deeds and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history. As a result, there shines forth fleetingly the ever threatened truth that each and every man, on the foundation of his own suffering and joys, builds for all.”― Albert Camus
“All grown-ups were once children… but only few of them remember it.” Antoine De Sainte Exupery
“It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do little – do what you can.” – Sydney Smith
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.[1][5] President Eisenhower 1953 “Cross of Iron Speech.”
“In the universe of atoms, friction is the norm, not the exception. It’s this very opposition, this challenge, that ignites the spark of innovation. When the world seems against you, embrace that resistance. It’s the sandpaper to your innovation, the very friction that shapes your destiny. Never stop pushing. Never stop dreaming. Here’s to the crazy ones who use that friction to sculpt their future.”― H.S. Crow, Lunora
“Everybody can be great because everybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love.”― Martin Luther King Jr.
“We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there ‘is’ such a thing as being too late. This is no time for apathy or complacency. This is a time for vigorous and positive action.”― Martin Luther King Jr.
“We must live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”― Martin Luther King Jr.
“The first people a dictator puts in jail are the writers, the teachers, the librarians – because these people are dangerous. They have enough vocabulary to recognize injustice and to speak out loudly about it. Let us have the courage to go on being dangerous people.”― Madeleine L’Engle
“Not everybody can be famous but everybody can be great, because greatness is determined by service.”― Martin Luther King Jr.
“Some things are best mended by a break.” Edith Wharton
“Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity.” James Baldwin
“The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.” James Baldwin
“As we peer into society’s future, we – you and I, and our government – must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.” [2] President Eisenhower Farewell Speech 1960
“What George Washington did right was to realize how much of what he thought was right was wrong.” Nathaniel Philbrick
“A happy person isn’t someone who’s happy all the time. It’s someone who effortlessly interprets events in such a way that they don’t lose their innate peace.”Naval Ravikant
“Play iterated games. All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.” Naval Ravikant
“To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.” James Baldwin
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together ” President Eisenhower Farewell Speech 1960
“Do it! What are you waiting on? Do it! Stand up for what you believe in. The world needs your voice. Whoever you are, you have something to say. Say it.”— Kerry Washington, American actress, director, and activist
“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.” Theodore Roosevelt
“Criticism is necessary and useful; it is often indispensable; but it can never take the place of action, or be even a poor substitute for it. The function of the mere critic is of very subordinate usefulness. It is the doer of deeds who actually counts in the battle for life, and not the man who looks on and says how the fight ought to be fought, without himself sharing the stress and the danger.” Theodore Roosevelt
“People all say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.” – Joseph Campbell
“People do not care how much you know until they know how much you care.” -John C. Maxwell
“The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.” James Baldwin
“Volunteers don’t get paid, not because they’re worthless, but because they’re priceless.” – Sherry Anderson
“It is not the story you listen to, it is the story that you listen through.” P Costello
“…the man who really counts in the world is the doer, not the mere critic-the man who actually does the work, even if roughly and imperfectly, not the man who only talks or writes about how it ought to be done.” Theodore Roosevelt
“Its not what you achieve in a life that matters so much as what you set in motion that carries on beyond your life.” P Andrew Costello
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” – George Bernard Shaw
“My dear, In the midst of hate, I found there was, within me, an invincible love. In the midst of tears, I found there was, within me, an invincible smile. In the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm. I realized, through it all, that… In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back. Truly yours, Albert Camus” ( the original quote has been added to here)
“It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.” – Epictetus
“Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.” James Balwdin
“I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And I will not let what I cannot do interfere with what I can do.” – Edward Everett Hale
“Our problem is not that we aim too high and miss, but that we aim too low and hit.”— Aristotle
“A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices.” – William James
“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” – Howard Thurman
“Hell has three gates: lust, anger, and greed.” The Bhagavad Gita
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” – Henry Ford
“I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.”— Angela Davis, American political activist & academic
“The miracle is this–the more we share, the more we have.” –Leonard Nimoy
“I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do. “ James Baldwin
“The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.” – Michelangelo
“We have lost the ability to create metaphors for life. We have lost the ability to give shape to things, to recognize the events around us and in us, let alone to interpret them. In this way we have ceased being the likenesses of God, and our existence is unjustified. We are, in fact, dead. . . . We feed on knowledge which has long since decayed.” Friedensreich Hundertwasser
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. ” James Baldwin
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.— The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Barry
“Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.” – Alejandro Jodorowsky
“The sun shines not on us but in us. The rivers flow not past, but through us. Thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing. The trees wave and the flowers bloom in our bodies as well as our souls, and every bird song, wind song, and tremendous storm song of the rocks in the heart of the mountains is our song, our very own, and sings our love.” John Muir
“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.” James Baldwin
“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.”― William Hutchinson Murray
“We must be silent before we can listen. We must listen before we can learn. We must learn before we can prepare. We must prepare before we can serve. We must serve before we can lead.” ― Mahatma Gandhi
“Thrice happy is the nation that has a glorious history. Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.” Theodore Roosevelt
“A liberal: someone who thinks he knows more about your experience than you do.” James Baldwin
“It is true of the Nation, as of the individual, that the greatest doer must also be a great dreamer.” Theodore Roosevelt
“This country will not be a permanently good place for any of us to live in unless we make it a reasonably good place for all of us to live in.” Theodore Roosevelt
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space lies our freedom.” – Viktor Frankl
“It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” James Baldwin
“Leaders don’t create more followers, they create more leaders.”― Tom Peters
“I used to think bearing witness was a passive act. I don’t believe that anymore. I think that when we are present, when we bear witness, when we do not divert our gaze, something is revealed — the very marrow of life. We change. A transformation occurs. Our consciousness shifts.” — Terry Tempest Williams
“Work for a cause, not for applause. Live life to express, not to impress. Don’t strive to make your presence noticed, just make your absence felt.”— Unknown
“The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”— Mark Twain
“What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.” (George Bernard Shaw)
If this work can contribute in any way toward proving this, and at the same time arouse the conscience of the American people to a demand for justice to every citizen, and punishment by law for the lawless, I shall feel I have done my race a service. Ida B. Wells
“No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do.”— Dorothy Day, Catholic social activist & journalist
“Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience, you must find yourself at war with your society. ” James Baldwin
“From time to time in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly so that you will come to know the value of justice. I hope you will suffer betrayal because that will teach you the importance of loyalty. Sorry to say, but I hope you will be lonely from time to time so that you don’t take friends for granted. I wish you bad luck, again, from time to time so that you will be conscious of the role of chance in life and understand that your success is not completely deserved and that the failure of others is not completely deserved either. And when you lose, as you will from time to time, I hope every now and then, your opponent will gloat over your failure. It is a way for you to understand the importance of sportsmanship. I hope you’ll be ignored, so you know the importance of listening to others, and I hope you will have just enough pain to learn compassion. Whether I wish these things or not, they’re going to happen. And whether you benefit from them or not will depend upon your ability to see the message in your misfortunes.” The Coddling of the American Mind: by Jonathan Haidt and Gregory Lukianoff
“There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.”― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance
“Your vocation in life is where your greatest joy meets the world’s greatest need.” —Frederick Buechner
“The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery.” (Mark Van Doren)
“When you see something that is not just, not fair, or not right, you have to do something. You have to say something. Make a little noise. It’s time for us to get into good trouble, necessary trouble.”— John Lewis, leader within American civil rights movements & former congressman
” My mentor taught me when an opportunity is presented to you, you look at it, and you FEEL it, and ask yourself Does this opportunity light me up? Does it fill me with a sense of curiosity? Does it excite me? If it does, hell yeah, I’m involved.“ –Layne Beachley
“The problem with being a leader is that you’re never sure if you’re being followed or chased.” – Claire A. Murray
“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.” Abraham Lincoln 1862
“Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.” Frederick Douglas 1857
“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.” Albert Einstein
“Where justice is denied, where
poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made
to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade
them, neither persons nor property will be safe.” Frederick Douglas
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” Frederick Douglas
“It is easier to build strong
children than to repair broken men.” Frederick
Douglas
“The limits of tyrants are
prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” Frederick Douglas
Those who make
peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” President
John F Kennedy 1962
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” Martin Luther King 1963
“It could be that your purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others.” Ashleigh Brilliant
“Enthusiasm is one of the most powerful engines of success. When you do a thing, do it with all your might. Put your whole soul into it. Stamp it with your own personality. Be active, be energetic, be enthusiastic and faithful, and you will accomplish your object. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.”― Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Action is the antidote to despair.”— Joan Baez, American singer-songwriter & activist
“One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.” – Andre Gide
“Treat a man as he is, and he will remain as he is. Treat a man as he could be, and he will become what he should be.”― Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Most of us are just about as happy as we make up our minds to be.” – Abraham Lincoln
“There is no better than adversity. Every defeat, every heartbreak, every loss, contains its own seed, its own lesson on how to improve your performance next time. Malcolm X
“Sometimes we are blessed with being able to choose the time, and the arena, and the manner of our revolution, but more usually we must do battle where we are standing.”— Audre Lorde, American writer, feminist, and civil rights activist
“Concerning nonviolence: it is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the
constant victim of brutal attacks.” Malcolm
X
“You can’t separate peace from freedom, because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.” Malcolm X 1965
. “You don’t fight racism with racism, the best way to fight racism is with solidarity.” – Bobby Seale
“Your actions speak so loudly, I can not hear what you are saying.”― Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages… In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried”― Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Protesting is never a disturbance of the peace. Corruption, injustice, war and intimidation are disturbances of the peace.” – Bryant McGill
“Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it has been faced. History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history. If we pretend otherwise we literally are criminals.”James Baldwin
“Precisely
at the point when you begin to develop a conscience, you must find yourself at
war with your society.” James Baldwin
“We can disagree and still love
each other, unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of
my humanity and right to exist.” James Baldwin
“When I dare to be powerful—to use my strength in the service
of my vision—then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid,”
Audre Lorde
“Your silence will not protect you,” Audre Lorde
“It is necessary that the weakness of the powerless is transformed into a force capable of announcing justice. For this to happen, a total denouncement of fatalism is necessary. We are transformative beings and not beings for accommodation.” Paulo Freire
“The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.” – Jane Addams
“If I can’t dance to it, it’s not my revolution.”― Emma Goldman
“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.” The Balfour declaration 1917
“There is a spirit and a need and a man at the beginning of every great human advance. Every one of these must be right for that particular moment in history, or nothing happens.” – Coretta Scott King
“Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.” Arundhati Roy
“No one will do for you what you need to do for yourself. We cannot afford to be separate. We have to see that all of us are in the same boat.” – Dorothy Height
“Wherever women gather together, failure is impossible.” – Susan B. Anthony
“We build the path as we can, rock by rock.” – Hosea Williams
“And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them.” Thomas Jefferson
“When an individual is protesting society’s refusal to acknowledge his dignity as a human being, his very act of protest confers dignity on him.” – Bayard Rustin
“You said, ‘They’re harmless dreamers and
they’re loved by the people.’ ‘What,’ I asked you, ‘is harmless about a
dreamer, and what,’ I asked you, ‘is harmless about the love of the people?
Revolution only needs good dreamers who remember their dreams.” Tennessee Williams
“THE STATE OF ISRAEL…will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.” The Israeli Declaration of Independence 1947
“The Lord has shown you what is good. He has told you what he
requires of you. You must act with justice. You must love to show mercy. And
you must be humble as you live in the sight of your God.” Micah 6-8
“Let justice roll down like waters.”
Amos 5:24
“A revolution is coming – a revolution which will be peaceful
if we are wise enough; compassionate if we care enough; successful if we are
fortunate enough – but a revolution which is coming whether we will it or not.
We can affect its character; we cannot alter its inevitability.” Robert F Kennedy
“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits.
The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who
see things differently. They’re not fond of rules, and they have no respect for
the status quo. You can quote them; disagree with them; glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things.
They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy
ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change
the world are the ones who do.“ — Rob
Siltanem –Apple Campaign
“Revolution does have to be violent precisely because the
Pharaoh won’t let you go. If the Pharaoh would let you go, the revolution won’t
have to be violent.” Michael Hardt
“I have always thought that in
revolutions, especially democratic revolutions, madmen, not those so called by
courtesy, but genuine madmen, have played a very considerable political part.
One thing is certain, and that is that a condition of semi-madness is not unbecoming
at such times, and often even leads to success.” Alexis de Tocqueville,
“Revolutions are the only political
events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.
”Hannah Arendt
“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!'” Jack Kerouac
“Everyone must come out of his Exile in his own way.” Martin Buber
“There are three principles in a man’s being and life: The principle of thought, the principle of speech, and the principle of action. The origin of all conflict between me and my fellow-men is that I do not say what I mean and I don’t do what I say.” Martin Buber
“Inscrutably involved, we live in the currents of universal reciprocity.” ”Martin Buber
“The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle.” Hannah Arendt
“’The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” Karl Marx
“The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” Steve Biko
“It is better to die for an idea that will live, than to live for an idea that will die” Steve Bantu Biko
“Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”― Antonio Gramsci
“In essentials, unity; in doubtful matters, liberty; in all things, charity.” Pope John XXIII
“Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.” Thoreau
“I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren
is that they take their feet off our necks.” Ruth Bader Ginsburg
“There
is no power for change greater than a community discovering what it cares
about.” – Margaret J. Wheatley
“If you want
to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” – African Proverb
“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” Alice Walker
“International
solidarity is not an act of charity: It is an act of unity between allies
fighting on different terrains toward the same objective. The foremost of these
objectives is to aid the development of humanity to the highest level
possible.”—Samora Machel.
Service which is
rendered without joy helps neither the servant nor the served.—Mohandas
Karamchand Gandhi
“It is a beautiful
thing to be on fire for justice… there is no greater joy than inspiring and
empowering others––especially the least of these, the precious and priceless
wretched of the earth!”― Cornel West,
“Everybody
can be great…because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree
to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only
need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.” –Martin Luther
King, Jr.
“The world
changes according to the way people see it, and if you can alter, even by a
millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change the
world.” –James Baldwin
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” –Margaret Mead
Habit is the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding, or regretting, of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all. William James
“One person with
passion is better than forty people merely interested.” –E.M. Forster
“No act of
kindness, however small, is ever wasted.” –Aesop
“I wish to do something Great and Wonderful,
but I must start by doing the little things like they were Great and
Wonderful.” ––“People say, ‘What is the sense of our small
effort?’ They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at
a time.” –Dorothy Day
“Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.” –St. Francis of Assisi ( ?)
“Act as if what
you do makes a difference. It does.” –William James
“It means a great deal
to those who are oppressed to know that they are not alone. Never let anyone
tell you that what you are doing is insignificant.” – Desmond Tutu
What counts in life is not the mere fact that
we lived. It is the difference we have made to the lives of others that will
determine the significance of the life we lead.–Nelson Mandela
“I would like to be remembered as a person who wanted to be free… so other people would be also free.” Rosa Parks
“No man is good enough to govern another man without his consent. ” Abraham Lincoln
“Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.” Abraham Lincoln
“With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan ~ to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” Abraham Lincoln
“When a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw. ” Nelson Mandela
“I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery.” Thomas Jefferson
I have walked that long road to freedom. I have tried not to falter; I have made missteps along the way. But I have discovered the secret that after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb. I have taken a moment here to rest, to steal a view of the glorious vista that surrounds me, to look back on the distance I have come. But I can only rest for a moment, for with freedom come responsibilities, and I dare not linger, for my long walk is not ended. Nelson Mandela
The function of freedom is to free someone else. Toni Morrison
You get your freedom by letting your enemy know that you’ll do anything to get it. Then you’ll get it. It’s the only way you’ll get it. Malcolm X
Everyone has oceans to fly, if they have the heart to do it. Is it reckless? Maybe. But what do dreams know of boundaries? Amelia Earhart
“We all have limits. Almost no one reaches theirs. You definitely haven’t.”
No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck. Frederick Douglass
Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them. Frederick Douglass
“What another would have done as well as you, do not do it. What another would have said as well as you, do not say it; what another would have written as well, do not write it. Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself — and thus make yourself indispensable.”— Andre Gide
“If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But, if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”— Lilla Watson
“Unless you’re the lead dog of the sled, the view never changes.” ( Author Unknown)
If you want to make enemies, try to change something.– Woodrow Wilson
When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.– Victor Frankl
If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.– Henry Ford
The ordinary focus on what they’re getting. The extraordinary think about who they’re becoming. Robin Scharma
“Resentment is like drinking poison and expecting the other guy to die.” Carrie Fisher
“Today’s pain is tomorrow’s power. The more you suffer today, the stronger you are tomorrow.” Unknown
You can judge your age by the amount of pain you feel when you come in contact with a new idea.– Pearl S. Buck
In any given moment we have two options: to step forward into growth or step back into safety.– Abraham Maslow
“Do it or don’t do it. There is no try.” Yoda
The most important thing to remember is this: To be ready at any moment to give up what you are for what you might become.– W.E.B. Du Bois
“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive, and then go do that. Because what the world needs are people who are alive.” – Howard Thurman
“One of the great liabilities of history is that all too many people fail to remain awake through great periods of social change. Every society has its protectors of status quo and its fraternities of the indifferent who are notorious for sleeping through revolutions. Today, our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
“When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace.” – Jimi Hendrix
“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.” – John Quincy Adams
“And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year: “Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.” And he replied: “Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.” So I went forth, and finding the Hand of God, trod gladly into the night. And He led me towards the hills and the breaking of day in the lone East. ” Christmas Message 1939 King George VI quoting poet Minnie Louise Haskins (My Mother’s favorite quote)
Peace is not merely a vacuum left by the ending of wars. It is the creation of two eternal principles, justice and freedom. – Author: James T. Shotwell
I will never forget that the only reason I’m standing here today is because somebody, somewhere stood up for me when it was risky. Stood up when it was hard. Stood up when it wasn’t popular. And because that somebody stood up, a few more stood up. And then a few thousand stood up. And then a few million stood up. And standing up, with courage and clear purpose, they somehow managed to change the world. Barack Obama
Change is the process by which the future invades our lives. ALVIN TOFFLER
The price of doing the same old thing is far higher than the price of change. BILL CLINTON
“I never heard of anyone ever stumbling on something sitting down.” – Charles F. Kettering
Be sincere; be brief; be seated. Franklin D. Roosevelt
Change comes from power, and power comes from organization. In
order to act, people must get together. SAUL ALINSKY
Change demands new learning. ROSABETH
MOSS KANTER
In times of profound change, the learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists. ERIC HOFFER
Societies as well as people become afraid of
change as they grow older. It’s human nature. The young have adventures while
the old sit at home and nurture their memories. PAUL MCAULEY
The sad thing is that, even though we know our lives aren’t
working in certain areas, we are still afraid to change. We are locked into our
comfort zone, no matter how self-destructive it may be. Yet, the only way to
get out of our comfort zone and to be free of our problems and limitations is
to get uncomfortable. ROBERT ANTHONY
“The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind. “MAYA ANGELOU
Always remember that the crowd that applauds your coronation is the same crowd that will applaud your beheading. People like a show. -Terry Pratchet, Discworld (Going Postal)
“There
is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more
uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new
order of things.” Niccolo Machiavelli The Prince
(1532)
“Every generation needs a new revolution.”— Thomas Jefferson
“when at long last I will happily go to meet my maker, he will say to me: ‘show me your wounds.’ And if I have no wounds, I will say to him: ‘I have no wounds.’ And he will say to me: ‘was there nothing worth fighting for?’” Speaker Pelosi’s quoted this story
You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. -Christopher Robin, Winnie The Pooh
No one
in history has ever been insulted into agreement.— Arthur Brooks
You can’t talk your way out of
something you behaved your way into. You have to behave your way out of it.— Doug Conant (CEO of Campbell Soup, as
quoted in Harvard Business Review)
You can never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete.— Buckminister Fuller
“How, then, does one become an activist? The easy answer would be to say that we do not become activists; we simply forget that we are. We are all born with compassion, generosity, and love for others inside us. We are all moved by injustice and discrimination. We are all, inside, concerned human beings. We all want to give more than to receive. We all want to live in a world where solidarity and companionship are more important values than individualism and selfishness. We all want to share beautiful things; experience joy, laughter, love; and experiment together.”― Noam Chomsky, On Palestine
“I watched the speech backstage on the
teleprompter. Obama paused for a moment, and I saw the text freeze. “I’m going
off script here for a second,” he said, “but before I came here I met with a
group of young Palestinians from the age of fifteen to twenty-two. And talking
to them, they weren’t that different from my daughters. They weren’t that
different from your daughters or sons. I honestly believe that if any Israeli
parent sat down with those kids, they’d say, I want these kids to succeed; I
want them to prosper. I want them to have opportunities just like my kids do. I
believe that’s what Israeli parents would want for these kids if they had a
chance to listen to them and talk to them. I believe that.” His comments were
met with rolling applause, and when he dived back into the prepared text it
occurred to me that this tribute—this imploring of Israelis to see Palestinians
as human beings no different from themselves—might be the most he would be able
to do to keep a promise to those Palestinian kids.”― Ben Rhodes, The World As It Is: Inside the Obama White House
“MOST OF THE NATIONS OF the Middle East can be divided into those with long histories and no oil, and those that have lots of oil and very little history. With a few notable exceptions, both groups share a common feature: they were cobbled together by outsiders. The borders of the modern Middle East were drawn by Europeans after the First World War with no regard for the interests or backgrounds of the people who inhabited it.”― Richard Engel, And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East
“Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.”― Bertolt Brecht
“A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song.” Moya Angelou
“The best way to find out whether you’re on the right path? Stop looking at the path.” –Marcus Buckingham
Live for your dreams, not your memories.
“The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread. When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out “stop!” Bertolt Brecht
When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.” ― Bertolt Brecht, Selected Poems
— “The compassion of the oppressed for the oppressed is indispensable. It is the world’s one hope.”― Bertolt Brecht
“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language.” Wittgenstein
“Or, in the intriguing words of existential philosopher Gabriel Marcel, hope is “a piercing through time … a kind of memory of the future.” ― C.R. Snyder, Psychology of Hope: You Can Get Here from There
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”. Wittenstein
“I am not young enough to know everything.” Oscar Wilde
‘Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.’ Orwell
‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ Orwell
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics.” All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. (…) ? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.”― George Orwell, Orwell on Truth
We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way God’s universe is made; this is the way it is structured.
I must say this morning that racial injustice is still the black man’s burden and the white man’s shame.
It is an unhappy truth that racism is a way of life for the vast majority of white Americans, spoken and unspoken, acknowledged and denied, subtle and sometimes not so subtle—the disease of racism permeates and poisons a whole body politic. And I can see nothing more urgent than for America to work passionately and unrelentingly—to get rid of the disease of racism.
And it may well be that we will have to repent in this generation. Not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say, “Wait on time.”
So we must help time and realize that the time is always ripe to do right.
And maybe we spend far too much of our national budget establishing military bases around the world rather than bases of genuine concern and understanding.
We are not coming to engage in any histrionic gesture. We are not coming to tear up Washington. We are coming to demand that the government address itself to the problem of poverty. We read one day, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” But if a man doesn’t have a job or an income, he has neither life nor liberty nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists.
We are coming to ask America to be true to the huge promissory note that it signed years ago. And we are coming to engage in dramatic nonviolent action, to call attention to the gulf between promise and fulfillment; to make the invisible visible.
And I submit that nothing will be done until people of goodwill put their bodies and their souls in motion. And it will be the kind of soul force brought into being as a result of this confrontation that I believe will make the difference.
It seems that I can hear the God of history saying, “That was not enough! But I was hungry, and ye fed me not. I was naked, and ye clothed me not. I was devoid of a decent sanitary house to live in, and ye provided no shelter for me. And consequently, you cannot enter the kingdom of greatness. If ye do it unto the least of these, my brethren, ye do it unto me.” That’s the question facing America today.
The judgment of God is upon us today. And we could go right down the line and see that something must be done—and something must be done quickly. We have alienated ourselves from other nations so we end up morally and politically isolated in the world. There is not a single major ally of the United States of America that would dare send a troop to Vietnam, and so the only friends that we have now are a few client-nations like Taiwan, Thailand, South Korea, and a few others.
On some positions, cowardice asks the question, is it expedient? And then expedience comes along and asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? Conscience asks the question, is it right?
There comes a time when one must take the position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must do it because conscience tells him it is right. I believe today that there is a need for all people of goodwill to come with a massive act of conscience and say in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “We ain’t goin’ study war no more.” This is the challenge facing modern man.
Let me close by saying that we have difficult days ahead in the struggle for justice and peace, but I will not yield to a politic of despair. I’m going to maintain hope as we come to Washington in this campaign. The cards are stacked against us. This time we will really confront a Goliath. God grant that we will be that David of truth set out against the Goliath of injustice, the Goliath of neglect, the Goliath of refusing to deal with the problems, and go on with the determination to make America the truly great America that it is called to be.
I say to you that our goal is freedom, and I believe we are going to get there because however much she strays away from it, the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be as a people, our destiny is tied up in the destiny of America.
Before the Pilgrim fathers landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before Jefferson etched across the pages of history the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence, we were here. Before the beautiful words of the “Star Spangled Banner” were written, we were here.
For more than two centuries our forebearers labored here without wages. They made cotton king, and they built the homes of their masters in the midst of the most humiliating and oppressive conditions. And yet out of a bottomless vitality they continued to grow and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery couldn’t stop us, the opposition that we now face will surely fail.
We’re going to win our freedom because both the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of the almighty God are embodied in our echoing demands. And so, however dark it is, however deep the angry feelings are, and however violent explosions are, I can still sing “We Shall Overcome.”
We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. MLK
“You must realize that I am far from feeling beaten…it seems to me that… a man ought to be deeply convinced that the source of his own moral force is in himself — his very energy and will, the iron coherence of ends and means — that he never falls into those vulgar, banal moods, pessimism and optimism. My own state of mind synthesises these two feelings and transcends them: my mind is pessimistic, but my will is optimistic. Whatever the situation, I imagine the worst that could happen in order to summon up all my reserves and will power to overcome every obstacle.” Antonio Gramsci
“The time has come for us to reimagine everything. We have to reimagine work and go away from labor. We have to reimagine revolution and get beyond protest. We have to think not only about change in our institutions, but changes in ourselves. We are at the stage where the people in charge of the government and industry are running around like chickens with their heads cut off. It’s up to us to reimagine the alternatives and not just protest against them and expect them to do better” — Grace Lee Boggs
“I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.” Oscar Wilde
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” Oscar Wilde
“How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these. – George Washington Carver
“When I was younger I made it a rule never to take strong drink before lunch. It is now my rule never to do so before breakfast.” Reply to King George VI, on a cold morning at the airport. As cited in Man of the Century (2002) Churchill
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” MLK
It’s not the load that breaks you down, it’s the way you carry it. – Lena Horne
“In the third space of the basement of Ebenezer Baptist Church, for example, Martin Luther King, Jr. rallied what became the core of a great movement following the arrest of Rosa Parks. In the third space of the Magic Lantern Theater an ex-convict named Vaclav Havel met with his peers to design a peaceful revolution that led him within several months to the Presidential Castle. In the third space of an organization called PEN, fellow writers stood bravely to share the hit placed by an Iranian ruler on Salman Rushdie. In the third space fronting Upper Darby (Pennsylvania’s) 69th Street Terminal, citizens of Delaware County have nightly, over the past five years, offered meals cooked in their own kitchens to their hungry and homeless neighbors.
As we seek to build social capital by means of community-based and nonprofit organizations, we work to assure that our social economy thrives, and that fewer of our fellow citizens either bowl or suffer alone. Such are the rewards of acting in the many and often surprising corners of society’s third space.” Van Till
A luta continua; victoria ascerta–A rallying cry of the FRELIMO movement during Mozambique’s war for independence.
“International solidarity is not an act of charity: It is an act of unity between allies fighting on different terrains toward the same objective. The foremost of these objectives is to aid the development of humanity to the highest level possible.”—Samora Machel.
Always hear the ‘Yes’ in the ‘No’. Marshall Rosenberg
“Simply put, hope reflects a mental set in which we have the perceived willpower and the waypower to get to our destination.” ― C.R. Snyder, Psychology of Hope: You Can Get Here from There
Content by PuddleDancer Press. Use of content okay with attribution. Please visit www.nonviolentcommunication.com to learn more about Nonviolent Communication.
“Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” Scott Peck
“Life becomes easier when you learn to accept the apology you never got.” —R. Brault
Service which is rendered without joy helps neither the servant nor the served.—Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
“It is a beautiful thing to be on fire for justice… there is no greater joy than inspiring and empowering others––especially the least of these, the precious and priceless wretched of the earth!”― Cornel West, Black Prophetic Fire
“If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.” —Mark Twain
“Everybody can be great…because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.” –Martin Luther King, Jr.
“The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you can alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change the world.” –James Baldwin
Forgiveness means giving up all hope of a better past. – Lily Tomlin possibly???
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” –Margaret Mead
“One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.” –E.M. Forster
What’s another word for Thesaurus? Steven Wright
“Resistance is the protest of those who hope, and hope is the feast of the people who resist.”― Jürgen Moltmann, The power of the powerless
“No act of kindness, however small, is ever wasted.” –Aesop
“I wish to do something Great and Wonderful, but I must start by doing the little things like they were Great and Wonderful.” –Albert Einstein
“People say, ‘What is the sense of our small effort?’ They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time.” –Dorothy Day
“Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.” –St. Francis of Assisi
“It means a great deal to those who are oppressed to know that they are not alone. Never let anyone tell you that what you are doing is insignificant.” – Desmond Tutu
What counts in life is not the mere fact that we lived. It is the difference we have made to the lives of others that will determine the significance of the life we lead.–Nelson Mandela
“The opposite of poverty is justice.” Bryan Stevenson
When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people. Abraham Joshua Heschel
I always wanted to be somebody, but now I realize I should have been more specific. Lily Tomlin
“When I am speaking, I always try to evolve the audience.” “You mean involve the audience?” “Oh yes, That too.” Kit Turen
“Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.” — Arthur Schopenhauer “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” —Wayne Gretzky
“Do the difficult things while they are easy and do the great things while they are small. A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” Lao Tzu
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” —Anonymous
“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind.” —Anonymous
“Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting — Sun Tzu
“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.” —Seneca
“I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.” – Oscar Wilde
“Wonder rather than doubt is the root of all knowledge. ” Abraham Joshua Heschel I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” — Thomas Edison
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.” — Richard Feynman
“I am always doing what I can’t do yet in order to learn how to do it.” — Vincent van Gogh “People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day.” – A.A. Milne
“Winnie the Pooh”“In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.” — Robert Frost
“To be nobody-but-yourself-in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else-means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.” — E.E. Cummings
“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.” —Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
“Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement… get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.”—Abraham Joshua Heschel
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” — H. Jackson Brown Jr., P.S. I Love You
“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.” — George Orwell, 1984
“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.” — Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
“To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s.” ― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
“Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.” —Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
. “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.” “I don’t much care where — ” “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.” — Alice and the Cheshire Cat (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll)
“Preventive war is like committing suicide for fear of death.” —Otto von Bismarck
“Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right.” —Henry Ford “The difference between genius and stupidity is; genius has its limits.” – Albert Einstein
“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.” — Warren Buffett
“Never once in my life did I ask God for success or wisdom or power or fame. I asked for wonder, and he gave it to me.”—Abraham Joshua Heschel “Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.” — Anonymous
“I’m in shape. Round is a shape.” – George Carlin
“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.” —Anonymous
“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is.” —Anonymous
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” — Anonymous
“To succeed in life, you need three things: a wishbone, a backbone, and a funny bone.” – Reba McEntire
“Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”— Anonymous
“Do what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are.” —Squire Bill Widener Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” — William Bruce Cameron
I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made. Franklin D. Roosevelt
“Victorious warriers win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.” —Zhang Yu
“As you get older, three things happen. The first is your memory goes, and I can’t remember the other two.” – Norman Wisdom
“There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.” —Zora Neale Hurston
“Never underestimate a man who overestimates himself.”― Franklin D. Roosevelt
Posts by Paul Costello1
