I Have a Dream . . .When the Impossible Became Possible

Today is a day of remembering in our household. Fifty years ago today, my beloved husband was part of the March on Washington. I asked him to be my guest essayist and write about what this experience meant for him.                                                                                                                                                                                                               

                                      ~  Elizabeth

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There are many quotes by Martin Luther King . . . but I chose this one to reflect upon this week.

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent
about things that matter.

When Elizabeth and I graduated from college, we married and moved from western Minnesota’s prairie to Washington, DC. The cultural differences and learning curves for both of us were immense! What an exciting and challenging time to live in this international city. It was a time much like today's world with many contemporary cultural changes and learning curves surrounding and penetrating us on a daily basis!

I remember the sky-blue Wednesday of August 28, 1963, the day of the March on Washington. On the day of the March, I was determined to make a difference! While Elizabeth spent her day at work - scared stiff for my life. There were predictions of possible violence. No one knew what was going to happen. And nobody knew how many people would actually come.

People kept coming and coming. The mass of marchers became huge. At the time, Washington DC newspapers and news reports argued as to the number. Early media reports said not even 100,000 “if that many.” Observers and March organizers maintained that there were at least 250,000 people. For myself, I was so naive. I thought everyone would come forward to "speak out with their feet." It was a way we could take action to make a difference.

I remember walking just four steps behind Martin Luther King. I was pressed to the front of the crowd, and ended up just at the base of the steps leading up to the Lincoln Memorial. I was enthralled by the music of Marian Anderson, Odetta, Dylan, Joan Baez, Mahalia Jackson, and Peter, Paul, and Mary. But it was the I Have A Dream Speech sounding forth by Dr. King that was the heady climax of an incredible day.

How could I have been so privileged as to be part of this movement that refused to be thwarted! This day changed my life forever. It became for me a new lens to look at the world in myriad ways.

But the time is now, August 28, 2013 . . .  so many of the same challenges still face us and our world. As well as many new ones that we couldn't even have imagined in 1963.

I would like to share something I wrote a couple years ago.

                                                                                                 

Been There, Done That!

I paused in the hallway with a mom and dad and their young daughter. The dad said to me,

I told her that you had been in the March on Washington. 

Marcie, tell him where you just were!

She replied, her eyes shining,

My class went to Washington, DC and 

I stood right in front of Martin Luther King’s statue, 

right in front. See, here is my picture!  

          

We paused there in the hallway, just looking at each other. Then I said,

Marcie, I have never seen that statue of Martin Luther King 

that you stood in front of . . . and do you know what?  

You were not there to walk with Martin Luther King, 

and yet – both of us have been there. 

She smiled a big smile and said,

I’m so glad!

                                                                  ~  Clem

Yesterdays Becoming Today

There is a certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse;

as I have found in traveling in a stagecoach, that it is often a comfort

 to shift one's position and be bruised in a new place.

                                                  ~  Washington Irving

Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.

                                                  ~  Marshall McLuhan

The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence;

 it is to act with yesterday’s logic.

                                          ~  Peter Drucker

It had been fund-raising time on PBS. Previews of shows to be aired, interspersed with sales pitches for people to join (donate), were advertised for several weeks before the pledge drive began. Many of those shows were singing groups from past times.

As I watched these “commercials,” rather than listening to the variety of music of the time, I was struck by changes in the way musical groups moved, sang, and dressed. And I began to reflect on the differences between the culture when I grew up and our present culture – against the backdrop of all the turbulence in today’s world.

People have referred to the fifties in various ways. Some see these times as idyllic because of the relief that we supposedly had fought the last world war – and that now things would be different. Except that it also was a time of rigid rules and the beginning of the Cold War. And I wondered how the strands of history since that time were being played out now, in the way countries are functioning – or not functioning.

Men ruled the world and women ruled the house.

Less than fifty percent of the population enacted all the laws.

Women felt lucky to vote – provided they were not black.

Discrimination was blatant and if drafted you went.

                    Today, the rules of life are much more complicated.

Boys took Shop so they could fix and build what was needed.

They played football, basketball, and ran track.

Girls took Home Ec and learned to cook and sew.

They cheered from the sidelines, wearing skirts not-too-short.

                    Today, women build and men cook gourmet.

No one traveled far, couples married young, bought a house.

Before they were twenty, babies began coming.

Wars were short with definite beginnings and endings.

Enlisting in the army or navy was the way to see the world.

                    Today, couples skip marriage and war is continuous.

Children were to be seen and not heard, and stay out of trouble.

Dad drove the car, and on Sundays families would go for a ride.

Meals were meat and potatoes – unless you were poor.

Parents hoped their kids would have more than they did.

                    Today, rapidly the middle class is becoming extinct.

Men wore suits and ties to church and women wore gloves.

Aprons were a must, dresses below the knees were standard.

Everyone knew their place, only a few challenged norms.

The moral standard by which everyone lived was honest hard work.

                    Today, we wear shorts to church, that is if we go to church.

Everyone spoke English, except maybe grandparents at home.

We were proud of our forebears, who had immigrated here.

But insisted we now were Americans and certainly not foreigners.

South America and Africa were large blank shapes on the map.

                     Today, we are multi-colored and beautifully diverse.

News-reels informed us of world events during Saturday matinees.

Local papers recorded who poured - and who was visiting whom.

Clothes-shopping happened in August just before school began.

And we hoped we wouldn't grow too fast through the next year.

                    Today, news happens in real time and we shop all the time.

Portable typewriters and luggage often were graduation gifts.

We added and subtracted on paper, rarely wrote checks.

No bookstores in small towns meant many homes had no books.

When computers first were invented, they filled entire rooms.

                     Today, we read Kindles and order on-line.

If we went to college, we used heavy calculators.

Requiring considerable strength to move them from desk to desk.

We carried state-of-the-art slide rules, useful as status symbols.

                        Guys them hung from their belt, while women carried theirs.

                    Today, solar calculators are the size of cell phones.

Telephones were party lines, used to hear the latest gossip.

Might not know who was listening, so took care what we said.

Long distance calls were kept brief, made only in emergencies.

Letters kept everyone current with relatives in other towns.

                    Today, Facebook connects and NSA collects our texts.

Today, children watch TV’s violence and reality shows.

Countries face off against each other with heated rhetoric.

Plane travel is increasingly adverse, terrorists plot and bomb.

Starvation, human trafficking, and climate-change are epidemic.

                    Yesterday, we believed life promised happy endings.

Now – about riding in stage coaches and shifting positions so as to be bruised in another place in one’s anatomy . . .

Cherry Blossom Blessings

If you break open the cherry tree

Where are the blossoms?

But in springtime they bloom!

                             ~ Ikkyu, 1394-1487

Every one of us stores away indelible images from significant events in our lives. For some people, those memories are sounds – a song or particular piece of music. For others, it may be the awe of touching a soft newborn’s head or the smell of lilacs in the spring. For many, visual cues bring back a flood of memories that when you close your eyes, you are right there - as if no time has past.

For me, cherry blossoms are engraved in my mind. Pink clouds of beauty surrounding once bare trees, their petals drifting downward as lazy as the first soft snows of winter. Even though it has been decades since I lived in Washington DC, cherry blossoms bring back a cascade of memories from the city that so transformed my life. In my mind’s eye, I see places on the mall such as the Lincoln, Jefferson, and Washington Memorials, the National Gallery of Art, and the Capital, which evoke further memories of this fascinating city.

When we brought our first-born home from the hospital, the famed cherry blossoms around the Tidal basin were in full bloom. They are reminders of my giving birth for the first time. Within a day’s time, I had become a parent. But more so, these flowering trees of beauty are symbolic in many ways of who I have become as a person.

Washington’s cherry trees are an expression of friendship between Japan and the United States. For a century, these beautiful clouds of spring have called us to the enduring need for peace in a troubled world. That living together in our diversity of cultures requires more than international borders, resolution of immigration issues, and peace treaties. It is friendship that the world needs most.

The first cherry trees arrived here from Japan in 1912, before either country would be drawn into war with each other. The trees endured the terrible years, when dropping bombs from the air became defining factors determining who we are as a people for the first time. When we dropped those first atomic bombs, we altered the face of Japanese culture. Just as our culture was permanently changed, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. And Nagasaki and Hiroshima became forever burned into the history of the world.

It took a long time for our two countries to restore their friendship with each other. A decade after the war ended, little boys in my country were still drawing pictures in Sunday School with the words “bomb the Japs” written across planes raining terror downward. While the Japanese had used the symbolism of the cherry blossoms to stoke nationalistic fervor during the war – even painting cherry blossoms on planes before bombing missions to symbolize the intransient nature of life.

For the Japanese, cherry trees have meanings embedded deep in the Japanese psyche. Meanings going beyond the symbol of friendship that Washington’s trees represent. Images of cherry blossoms are woven through throughout Japan’s poetry, especially its haiku and waka forms, as well as its art and music. After Buddhism was brought to Japan from China in the 700’s, images of cherry and plum blossoms reflect its subtle themes. No one word describes their meanings. Ephemeral. Impermanence. Beauty. The reality of our mortality. And more.

The custom of hanami (flower-viewing) in the spring and picnicking under the blooming trees began long ago in the 700’s - or perhaps even earlier in the third century with celebration of cherry blossom festivals. Today when the cherry trees bloom, Japanese people flock to temples, shrines, and gather with friends and family for flower-viewing parties.  One Japanese woman, tongue in cheek, described it as a time for men to gather together under the trees and drink too much sake.

Japan is a long archipelago of islands. Cherry trees begin to bloom in southern Okinawa in January, reaching Kyoto and Tokyo by the end of March or the beginning of April. Hokkaidō, the northern-most major island, begins to see its cherry trees bloom a few weeks later. The dates are not exact and are dependent upon weather, so the Japanese meticulously track their progress with cherry blossom reports after the nightly weather forecast.

When I went to Japan a year ago – one century after the first cherry trees were planted in Washington DC – I did not expect to see cherry blossoms. The timing of my trip wasat least  two weeks too late, after tender young leaves would have replaced the pale pink blossoms. But much to my surprise and delight, it had been an unusually cold and lingering winter for Japan. This very late spring meant the trees bloomed while I was there!

Osaka-Kobe is an industrial city and a large seaport. The air was grey with smog – yet cherry trees had exploded in full bloom along the Okawa River. I drifted down the river by boat with Japanese families full of excitement. Walkers were everywhere along the river. People sat talking among the trees as if they had not a care in the world. It was hanami at its height. Forgotten were the realities of heavy industry and sea-faring ships. Forgotten were economic concerns of the world. Flower-viewing meant being present in all this beauty. One of those time-standing-still moments of my life.

Later I traveled southward to Nagasaki where time had stood still in the horrific moments when we unleashed nuclear bombs on Japan – a postscript to a war that already had ended. At Nagasaki’s Peace Park I wander among monuments from various countries and pondered their meanings. At one end of the park, multi-colored origami peace cranes hung in chains, thousands of cranes. For centuries, cranes have been considered sacred symbols of good luck, long life and love. Folding paper cranes has become one more way to surmount the losses suffered during this war of the world.

A massive statue dominates the other end of the Peace Park. The figure points one arm skyward, signifying where nuclear devastation streamed down. Its other arm extends horizontally as a promise and hope for peace. I ask myself if I could have found such hope if it had been my country, my city that was so utterly destroyed.

Despite what the park signifies, it is a serene place. It provided space for me to reflect on my questions about why humans struggle for world dominance, using increasingly sophisticated weapons of war. This Peace Park was another world away from happy families celebrating the legendary cherry blossoms. And the friendship offered by Japan in such another time. The gift of cherry trees that ring the Tidal Basin in Washington.

As I stood there, I looked up. A solitary crane flew overhead. Since cranes mate for life and are never far from each other, I wondered if it was a young crane not yet mated – or an older crane grieving the loss of its mate. Paired with my fresh memories of clouds of cherry blossoms, the crane was a fitting blessing of my experience in Japan.