King’s message: selflessness is key

First of all, I don’t want to sound like I am complaining, but I think Chadron State College and every  school in America needs to observe Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and cancel classes.

King has done a lot for this country and it’s people, and even though he was black, his fight was not limited to just his race. Martin Luther King fought for the greater good, just like Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Theresa, and Nelson Mandela, to name a few.

We need to observe the day as a memorial and reflect on what King had to say.  He left us many important words that we should follow.

In his 1958 commencement speech at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Ga.,  King said that “An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.”

He also said in his “Facing the Challenge of a New Age” speech from 1956,  that “whatever your life’s work is, do it well. A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead, and the unborn could do it no better.”

These are the values we need to teach children, and the world will be a better place. We tend to think about own well-being too much these days, and are too self-involved.   We should be more selfless like King was.

His fight was not just about civil rights for black people; it was about equal rights for latinos, jews, and all minorities. We know today that we can’t have laws or regulations favoring only African Americans, Caucasians, or Jews, Christians, and Muslims.  There’s a lot more equality today than during King’s time, but there’s still work to be done.

This country is made of people of different backgrounds, and we still need to make sure that they are treated fairly.

King is who the day is named after, but there are many other civil rights pioneers and activists that we can also honor on that day.

From Cesar Chavez, to Malcolm X, I think we can take a day out of the class schedule to honor and recognize those who fought for the well-being of all peoples.  They should be equally honored because they have achieved what most thought was impossible, and provide hope for us to go out and achieve.