Читать книгу Hope’s Daughters - R. Wayne Willis - Страница 46

If you can remember when drivers dimmed car lights by stomping the dimmer with their left foot, then you could be a dinosaur like me.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his brother were driving one evening in the mid-1950s from Atlanta to Chattanooga. The oncoming drivers evidently didn’t know to dim their lights when meeting a car, and A.D. King, who was driving, became furious. At one point A.D. said, “The next driver who refuses to dim his lights, I’m going to give it right back to him; I’ll leave mine on bright and blind him and we’ll see how he likes it.” Dr. King said, “Oh no, don’t do that. There’d be too much light on this highway, and it will end up in mutual destruction for all. Somebody’s got to have some sense on this highway.”31

Someone has got to have sense enough to dim the lights.

I teach college seniors the Socratic method of group discussion. They learn to listen respectfully when someone speaks and then respond with civility. Cutting off or drowning out or ridiculing a person with whom they disagree earns an “F” in participation. To see how not to have a group discussion, I tell them to turn on particular television shows where panel members yell at, shout down, and put down each other.

Dr. King also said in the same sermon to his Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery:

Force begets force, hate begets hate, toughness begets toughness. And it is all a descending spiral, ultimately ending in destruction for all and everybody. Somebody must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate and the chain of evil in the universe. And you do that by love.

Another Valentine’s Day can remind us, on this dark, narrow, rancorous highway of life, to lower our voices, dim the lights, and try a little love.