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Just two weeks ago, Martin Luther King was still a great man whose photograph I could recognize on the corridor wall of school, whose speech I could recite fragmentarily and still by the Chinese version. Just two weeks ago, I was just a girl in the millions who has never tried to view this world in a totally different way, who bogged down in the confusion of own future. While fortunately, I read this speech----every word is yelling in my heart.
I was fond of this speech at the first time I came across it for I have been fanatic with a book throughout my whole childhood and youth hood, that’s gone with the wind. Every Negro character in the book is substantial to me, and they occurred to my mind went through hundreds of years while I read this text. I knew I was immersed. At a time I imaged myself as one of the 22million negroes America who engaged in a creative battle to end the long night of racial injustice and the wind blew from the Lincoln Memorial whipped my face sharply and sorely. I feel indignant when I view the negative experiences, the existence of sixty percent of a person. I feel incapable when I face the capitalistic economy and political power as an individual in the enormous sphere .I feel my blood pounded strongly in my check when I read the words ‘self – esteem’ ‘self-affirmation’ and ‘self-improvement’ After all, I feel impressed by the country which listened to this voice and corrected itself again and again “Darkness cannot put out darkness. Only light can do that”
At that time I learnt to look at the world in another way that the misery can not be eliminated no matter how dynamically the society develops while the progress does made through the history of human. There is always a long way to go from where we are now. Never for a moment had I forgot that I am living in the third world and there are huge gaps in many aspects. I asked myself a question where do we go from here? Undoubtedly, I can’t answer it, but in my twenties, I recognize the words economy、 power 、capital 、violence not only as the characters on the text which used to be but the symbols vivid in my mind. Martin Luther King exclaimed to Negroes “we must stand up!’’, he exclaimed with his strongest voice to ask to restructure the strength of economic and political power. Today, 50years later, this exclamation hovers over my ears and our society status ,“We must stand up!” Economic strength interacts on power, however, we have been playing with the rule made by others for a long time in the market. To get rid of the mercy of the capitalistic financiers, we said, in other words-----Chain, you must be born again, be born with the strong inner strength to restructure the economy.
When we were having the writing class last week, the foreign teacher Bryce who came from Seattle explained that he settled in China just because he believed that the 21century belongs to China. I giggled and then I smiled. 21century is so long, why can’t I believe that the world can be riffled within one hundred years? I still assert that this is also an age with miracles.
Where do we go from here? I want to answer this question one day with the pen and ink of experience and thought after a path I stretch out. I want to write a book when I got old in which I used to suppose to talk about the love or youth or something related to this, but now if I really do it one day, there must be two words in the foreword: virtue and struggle. Open the lanai, stand on the balcony. I heard the voice yelling in the wind “We have overcome, we have overcome, deep in my heart, I did believe we would overcome.”
2012/9/15 Night
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