Hello Friends,

January 20th presented a huge contrast of who America is, as it was both Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and Donald Trump’s Inauguration - one version of who we are as a nation and a different version that challenges us about what direction we will go. I hope we take the direction of truth, justice, courage, kindness, compassion, fairness and unity - all virtues that Dr. King taught us.

Yet, I am personally feeling despair about where we are in this country right now and fearing the consequences of the direction we have chosen. I found a few words that offer me encouragement, and I want to share them also with you.

Jon Meacham says, “In the battle between the impulses of good and of evil in the American soul, what Lincoln called 'the better angels of our nature' have prevailed just often enough to keep the national enterprise alive.”

Howard Zinn says, “To be hopeful in bad times … is based on the fact that human history is not just cruelty, but also compassion, sacrifice, courage and kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places, and there are so many, where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.”

And, of course, Dr. King, himself, in his speech at the National Cathedral in Washington DC in 1968 (I encourage you to read the whole message entitled, “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,”) said this:

“We have difficult days ahead in the struggle for justice and peace, but I will not yield to a politic of despair… We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

As we enter into this new chapter, I hope we will not yield to a politic of despair and that, instead, we will choose the path of the arc of the moral universe so that together we bend it toward justice.

In Service,

Carol Burnett

Executive Director