We Are Falling Short | How George Raveling Was Given the “I Have a Dream” Speech

Welcome to the daily stoic podcast, where each day we bring you a stoic inspired meditation designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000 year old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit dailystoic.com. Today is Martin Luther King Junior Day here in America, and it's worth taking a minute today to consider one particularly brilliant and inspiring part from King's approach to civil rights. What Martin Luther King didn't do in the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties was simply point out how hypocritical and flawed The United States was. He didn't use his immense skills as an order to paint a depressing bleak picture of the racial state of affairs. On the contrary, what MLK did was work hard to capture the true essence of what America was supposed to be. He picked up all the central beliefs of the founding fathers, justice, freedom, equality, and then he said, we can live up to this. We can do this together. We are capable of better. Of course, America did not hear this message immediately. In fact, huge swaths of the population did not wanna hear it at all. So King and his followers showed them. They took to the streets and through the new medium of television made it undeniable just how far short America had fallen from its ideals, how disgusting and disturbing segregation and racism were. Faced with this appalling spectacle, the country worked little by little to reach for that higher standard he set for us, to fulfill the vision of what the country was intended to be. It should be said that the Stoics follow a similar tact. Unlike some philosophies and religions which use their logic and intellect to make life seem meaningless and small, the Stoics sought to inspire the individual to reach their full human potential. Sure. They would point out the discrepancies and failures, but only to make a larger point, to be able to say, look at you. You are better than this. You can do more. You need to do more. And in Marcus Aurelius' writings, we find a man who in his private moments sought to say to himself, you studied this philosophy your whole life. Now you're in a position of power. Live up to it. Make good on your promises. Be what your fathers hoped you could be. And, of course, this is not easy to do. We will fall short along the way. We will fall embarrassingly and shamefully short. In the case of civil rights, it took hundreds of years for the full version of the equality laid out in the declaration of independence in The US constitution to be made true. And we're …