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| Rosa Parks (ca. 1955) (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Today, I watched the president of the USA speak at the installation of the statue of Rosa Parks. She was an icon of the US movement for civil rights when I was just a child.
He said,
"Whether out of inertia or selfishness, whether out of fear or a simple lack of moral imagination we so often spend our lives as if in a fog, accepting injustice, rationalizing inequity, tolerating the intolerable like the bus driver but also like the passengers on the bus. We see the way things are, children hungry in a land of plenty, entire neighbourhoods ravaged by violence, families hobbled by job-loss or illness and we make excuses for inaction. We say to ourselves that's not my responsibility. There's nothing I can do. Rosa Parks tells us there's always something we can do. She tells us that we all have responsibilities to ourselves and to one another. She reminds us this is how change happens. Not mainly through the exploits of the famous and the powerful but through the countless acts of often anonymous courage and kindness and fellow feeling and responsibility that continually stubbornly expand our conception of justice, our conception of what is possible. Rosa Parks' singular act of disobedience launched a movement. "
