Stand up!

As I look out my office window at the police cars, news crews, and gawkers below, I think about the hoopla that has surrounded the death of Rosa Parks. I watched as they brought her body to the church around the corner from where I work with busloads of people following her, and I can hear a choir singing in the church, whose back I can see from my desk.

When I contemplate the meaning of this woman's life and the events taking place in DC today, I recall reading the stories about her in primary school. I never really understood the significance of her action as a child. I suppose that is because I couldn't fathom a world where people were legally kicked out of their bus seats because of their race. Rosa Parks did that. She gave me and all future generations the luxury of never knowing such legal bigotry. She isn't just a figure in a text book, she was a real person, and what she did ended one of the most heinous and shameful chapters of American history and in world history. (Al Sharpton is speaking now, I can nearly hear every word from his boisterous voice.)

As us human beings struggle to promote and protect human rights on this lonely, single planet we all must share, Rosa Parks is a shining example of what us common folk can do to change the world. She was the spark that set the flame. Those of us who sit complacently while continuing to let human rights abuses go on are the ones who should be sitting in the back of the bus. We need to be out there condemning the hatred of the Moldy Footballs folks, those wingnuts who would sit comfortably while legal discrimination went on and who advocate the death of entire ethnic groups. It is only when the last shred of bigotry and hatred are wiped from the face of this small globe that we will be truly free.

"When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"