A Different Point of View

I have been mulling over what quote to use for today's post. I have searched all over the internet, tried to get inspiration from the movies that I watched over the weekend (Lee Daniel's The Butler and 12 Years a Slave) and even tried to get inspiration over the fact that this post falls on a national holiday, but none of it was working. I was planning on writing about freedom and I didn't really have a defined lead until I found the quote below.

I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.” Toni Morrison

 Toni Morrison is an author and a professor, which explains why she mentions her students. In 1993 she won the Nobel Prize in Literature because she gave life to "...an essential aspect of American reality."

We as American citizens love the idea of freedom. We plaster it on anything that we can and at the same time, disregard the importance of it. I believe we take freedom for granted and especially with some people my age, don't take our freedom and rights seriously. 

Maybe this is just me having been influenced by some great people and the literature, but I believe we must treasure all the freedom we have and be willing to give freedom to others. That's part of the reason I watched The Butler and 12 Years a Slave so I would be reminded about the times when people took advantage of freedom and wouldn't allow others to have it. Yes it is important to remember all the military men who serve, but what about those who served here who fought for the rights in our own country?

I can think of people like Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Francis Willard, Cady Stanton, Martin Luther King Jr., Maya Angelou, Gloria Steinem, Dorothy Pitman Hughes, Cesar Chavez and so many more who fought for the rights for different people. Do we just not want to honor these people as well, because they are some of the reason that we have some of the rights and equal rights?

I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.” Toni Morrison

"If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else." 

I don't care if you agree with all the people that I listed above or if you think that some of them are extremists, they had some power and fought for people's rights. It is always easy to just look at a holiday like Memorial Day and give credit to military men, which they do deserve credit, but there are the people on the home front who deserve credit too.

It is our responsibility to empower others to be able to have equal freedoms. We should not be satisfied with inequality, but fight for rights for all people. That means not being complacent with where we are because we are still off from living in a equal society. Morrison said it best when she said "...that [our] real job is that if [we] are free, [we] need to free somebody else."

Let us remember that on this Memorial Day. Remember those who have both fought in wars for our freedom, but also remember all those we fought, protested and enacted laws that made sure that we are free.