“We will surely get to our destination if we join hands.”
-Aung San Suu Kyi
In life we know there are no guarantees. Even with this known uncertainty sometimes the road less traveled is better when it is done when someone is alongside us. Aung San Suu Kyi is the first and incumbent State Counsellor of Myanmar and also the leader of the National League for Democracy. It is during this time that she played a vital role in the state’s transition from military junta to partial democracy. Her quote serves as one of inspiration in what I feel is at our most desperate hour. We will reach our destination only if we do it together.
There are many times where we have joined hands to overcome certain challenges that lie before us as a nation. Movements like the March on Washington on August 28,1963 led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr where he and so many others advocated for the civil and economic rights of African Americans with his I Have A Dream Speech where he said:
“I still have a dream, a dream deeply rooted in the American dream – one day this nation will rise up and live up to its creed, ‘We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal.’”
Another moment happened two years later 1965 in Selma, Alabama where men and women marched in support of voting rights for all African Americans across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. It was during this peaceful protest that state troopers and county members violently attacked the marchers, leaving many of them injured and bloodied — and some of them unconscious. But this did not stop them. Fifty years later President Barack Obama and the rest of the First Family along with United States House of Representatives John Lewis, who was one of the many that marched all of those years earlier marched across this same bridge hand in hand. President Obama commemorated this historic event by saying the following:
“[Selma] is instead the manifestation of a creed written into our founding documents: ‘We the People…in order to form a more perfect union.’ ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ These are not just words, “They’re a living thing, a call to action, a roadmap for citizenship and an insistence in the capacity of free men and women to shape our own destiny.
It’s these type of defining moments and speeches like Barack Obama’s and Dr. Martin Luther King’s that define a generation and laid down the roadmap for the most recent Black Lives Matter marches as well as future marches for equity for all. Each time, this has not been done alone but rather together. It is through this type of unity that change can and did in fact happen. And it is what is needed now. So let us join hands with one another and help lead our country towards making this world a better place.
What does this quote mean to you and how can you apply today’s message towards becoming more socially aware and developing your relationship skills?
Becoming The Change 