History always repeats itself because of past lessons unlearned. We just keep doing that ‘dance’ until we get it right. – The Crisis Magazine
Time magazine recently called millennials the “Me, Me, Me Generation,” and said we are lazy, entitled narcissists who still live at our parent’s house.
Touché. Although I think I love my Windows phone 8x by HTC far more than I love myself.
But Time has a point. I could have saved the world twice over had I not spent hours taking that unorthodox Facebook selfie.
Even so, to improve my excessive love of self I picked up on the many benefits of running.
(Summer/Fall body tip: running is one of the best forms of exercise for losing or maintaining a consistent weight.)
After carrying out my goal to run five miles to Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio from nearby Xenia, Ohio, I felt a great amount of accomplishment.
Before I could do so however I had to build my endurance. This meant waking up at 5 a.m. every week day before work and telling myself “just do it” when I psyched myself out from the challenge.
Once capable, I confronted the test head on with my running partner.
It is a straight shot to Central State when you arrive on US-42 North. You pass farmland and a few small creeks while listening to the songs of birds on the route.
Three quarters into the run I imagined how blacks felt when walking several miles to school throughout the Civil Rights era.
I remembered reading how Frederick Douglass mother walked 12 miles at night to spend half an hour with him, only to walk back to avoid a whipping from her slave master for missing field labor in the morning.
“Man, we take a lot for granted nowadays,” I said to myself. “We’re in need of a revolution…”
50 years ago on August 28, 1963 some 250,000 people joined hands to march on Washington for jobs and freedom.
Martin Luther King gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech and the rest is history:
“And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”
I ask, with the 50th anniversary of the largest demonstration ever seen in the nation’s capital fast approaching, what change will the March on Washington bring to my generation?
Will we use our voices and take action like those before us, or will we sit out-of-the-way with our eyes glued to social media–allowing another generation to slip through the cracks?
This is why it is a great time to be an American. Because we have to consistently fight to create the change that we wish to see.
Hope springs eternal, even in an instant gratification society such as ours.
After running, working and sweating, and fighting off thoughts of quitting too soon, I reached Central State in good time.
I never been happier to see Central State’s motto on a flag waving high into the wind: “Change is Central”.
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