What stood out the most to me out of the readings was the concept of how one must truly understand oneself and the cause they are fighting for. To identify who they are as a person and what their true values and beliefs are. So many people believe in a cause worthy to fight for but many times those people begin to lose sight of their beliefs. Myles Horton co-founder of the Highlander once decided to leave Highlander to become an organizer for textile workers. Horton explains he was a good organizer except his success for mobilizing crowds brought him a sense of power. A sense which lead him to believe he was doing everything right until he realized and asked himself, “What the hell am I doing? What is this? ...I was thinking about the feeling of power. I was a little scared of it, and yet I was fascinated by it” (Horton, 110). Horton later decided to quit being an organizer and decided to get back to education.
In The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear speaks of Billy Wayne Sinclair a who was serving time in jail for killing a store clerk and was offered to buy his freedom for $15,000. This was not the first time people were given the opportunity to buy their freedom but as Sinclair said “ he’d spent half his life struggling to become, as he puts it, a ‘moral man,’ and finally had been able to see someone other than a ‘convicted murderer’ in the mirror” (Loeb, 280). Even during the Civil Rights Movement Martin Luther King Jr. noticed that people did not truly understand the true reason of why African-Americans were fighting for equal rights. King said he had expected southern religious leaders to understand they were not being extremists in the sense of violence but extremists in the sense of love, truth, and goodness. When visiting Birmingham King realized that “numerous religious leaders of the South call upon their worshippers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministers say, ‘Follow this decree because integration is morally right and the Negro is your brother” (Loeb, 286).
I believe everyone in one point or another is confronted with a situation in which they must ask themselves if they are proud of what they have accomplished right now and if they have not undermined their values and beliefs. It is easy to get overwhelmed with power and throw everything away, to take the easy way out and not pay the consequences for ones actions.
I remember during my first summer of Upward Bound all the first time students had to do some kind of community service. I was in the group who was responsible for cleaning up the local parks and doing gardening. There were fifteen students and our supervisor and out of the fifteen students five of us had done some type of experiences in gardening. We were divided into groups and given different tasks to accomplish, we decided to stick together. Point is we were “good”, we got our tasks done and finished rather quickly. Because of that we got to use tools the other students could not use and were given other tasks. We got complimented for our work and we felt like the big shots in our group. So much one day we finished our all our tasks early and were told we could leave early because we had done enough for today. All five of us did that without hesitation instead of staying and helping others finished their tasks so we could all leave early.
I felt bad later that day because I did something I usually never do which is forget that we were a team and we should of helped our fellow students. I felt like I was better than them because I had prior experience and it was easy to be in that mindset because I had four other friends who felt like that. It was more like proving how much better we were compared to them more like a competition to show off that five of us could do much more than the rest put together. I knew it was not right, I felt bad and something in me was bothering me. Although we had permission to leave I could stayed but decided not to. For that reason I decided to help out whenever I could and always stayed behind to help out the others even when my duties were done. It felt good, I felt better about myself and understood that because I had prior experience I should never think I’m better than others. I believe one should never make decisions that they will later regret, always stay true to yourself and you will always be grateful for how you live your life.