G.K. Chesterton would have loved Martin Luther King, Jr. It was Chesterton, after all – a rotund British optimist brimming with merriment and fantasy – who noted the central necessity of The Dream to human existence, saying:
The center of every man's existence is a dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, like a toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel.
But it was King who pulled the American Dream red hot from the fires of racism, hatred, and inequality, and poured on it justice that “roll[ed] down like a water”, a sense of righteousness that swept through a rejuvenated America “like a mighty stream.” The forces of weakness in his country imprisoned, beat, ridiculed, and ultimately murdered King for the audacity of his hope, but King – visionary, saint, hero – never faltered or failed. In 1964, from the steps of the Lincoln memorial he shouted:
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!
And speech by speech, struggle by struggle, King’s dream swept up a populace mired in the shame of its original sin. He retook our dream – freedom, equality, brotherhood – from the clutches of the national nightmare that had held it hostage for two hundred years. In his life and death, he transformed the United States, and mobilized the entire world for a half century assault on those ideologies from Memphis to Johannesburg that would deny people their basic human rights.
That is vision. Big. Powerful. Ecstatic. Overwhelming. Passionate. Persistent. Firm.
Vision is revolutionary. It is the driving force behind our greatest movements and speeches – Churchill before British Parliament in 1940, Faulkner speaking up for the immutability of the human heart at the height of the atomic scare, Bobby Kennedy grieving with a country on announcing the death of the U.S.’s greatest dreamer. It is, when we see it in others, the very passion that gives us hope and inspires us to loyalty; but too often, obscured by the daily struggles of dentist appointments, office deadlines, and faltering romantic relationships, vision is lacking from our adult lives. Why is that?
At one time, we all had dreams. As kids, we turned wagons into chariots and family dogs into noble steeds. We battled dragons and pictured ourselves in legends and storybooks, living and breathing courage and clarity, and charging headlong into adventure, if only to fight for what our tiny brains knew was right. We loved other people around us thoughtlessly – innocent of the lines of race, religion, and creed that so often divide us as adults – and we thought in terms of stories. “For what do I want to be remembered?” “What would a hero look like here?” “What, in this situation, kingdom, or fairytale, is right?”
As kids, I think, we are blessed with an innocence of irony – we have no concept of the absurd and we have an acute awareness of proper ranking: heroism is more important that temporary physical discomfort, courage is more important than the possibility of failure, getting one big thing right is more important than the day-to-day possibility of error. But as adults, we learn failure after failure, struggle after minor struggle, and detail after detail, to subjugate the dream to reality. We forfeit real vision – expansive, daring, and dangerous – for smaller goals and accomplishments that are safer and easier to see.
But what would this world look like without vision, without those proponents of vision, visionaries? What would your life look like – what would my life look like – if great people tempted by a little temporary comfort had given up on their wild and seemingly impossible dreams? It is hard to imagine that world because here, at the height of the new millennia, we stand on the shoulders of giants; but really think of the stories wouldn’t have without our visionaries.
There would be no United States and no democracy. The founding fathers and their intellectual contemporaries in England and France were not mere subjects of the crown, but dreamers who saw in the New World a new possibility – a society without class or inborn limits, a culture of liberty, hope and choice – and were so inspired by their vision that they sacrificed wealth, comfort, and even life to birth into the world a new idea: that “all men are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights” and that governments should not be empowered to take those rights away. We wouldn’t have a free and peaceful South Africa. Without the daring of Mandela and Tutu, the evils of apartheid might still envelop that beautiful country, and without their equally preposterous vision – that mercy, progressivism, and hope should dominate a post-apartheid world – we might have an embattled South Africa to this day.
Without the vision of Watson and Crick, we may never have attacked those building blocks we call DNA and opened a world of hopeful possibility. Without a cigar-smoking, overweight historian named Winston Churchill, we may never have found the moral courage to fight the 20th century’s most evil and dangerous ideology, bringing from the ashes of World War II a rejuvenated West basking in the glory of its “finest hour”. And without the leadership of other visionaries – Hayek, von Mises, Thatcher, Solzhenitsyn, and John Paul II – we may never have come to the point in the 20th century, where, staring at the physical boundary between a belief in ideology and a faith in the creative power of man, our own Great Communicator was empowered to proclaim:
After these four decades, then, there stands before the entire world one great and inescapable conclusion: Freedom leads to prosperity. Freedom replaces the ancient hatreds among the nations with comity and peace. Freedom is the victor….
General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!
Because, you see, we live in a world created on the dreams of history’s greatest men and women. We live an existence predicated on the fact that some people, undeterred by circumstance and probability are willing to sacrifice everything for hope. In our individual lives we see this in smaller ways as parents fight to give us better lives, and stick with us even as we forsake them. We see this in friends who have the vision to see through our addictions, moral failures, and weaknesses to the light on the other side of our futures; and we see this in our kids, who look at us with a love and hope we have lost in ourselves because they, in their innocence, see not who we are, but who we could be.
What is your vision today? What is your dream? What big, unconquerable hope do you hold to even in the face of failure and despair; and what story or passion do you see as bigger than your present circumstance, big enough, even, to warrant faith.
Many people see vision as a talent. I see it as a virtue, a choice. We can either wake up today in faithlessness ready to encounter only the concerns of daily life, or we can see over these hills to something bigger and more beautiful, a place that until it becomes reality, seems suited only for dreams.
