Ubuntu and Engaging with Life

This is the speech I delivered at the National Junior Honor Society Induction Ceremony at Princess Anne Middle School on May 9, 2018. My remarks are directed to 7th and 8th grade students.

First, to those returning and to those coming in, I am proud of you. I am impressed that so many young people have met the rigorous standards the National Junior Honor Society has set for scholarship, citizenship, character, service, and leadership. That you are here tonight speaks volumes about the kind of young people you are, young people who embody the values you were raised with, young people who have risen to meet the expectations placed in front of you, young people who have made choices that give us every reason to believe that the world our generation will place in your hands will be a better place because of you. In fact, I am confident that I speak for your parents, your family, your teachers, your coaches, your community, when I say quite simply, we are proud of you.

This year was the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination. He is a personal hero of mine, a true world changer, and the occasion prompted me to spend time with his words and speeches. I am going to take the opportunity here to share an abridged portion of one of them, often called the “Street Sweeper” speech, because I believe it speaks to the core of National Junior Honor Society, and the journey you are beginning. Believe it or not, he shared this speech with an audience of junior high school students in Philadelphia just months before he died. With apologies to Dr. King, I share it here:

“I want to ask you a question, and that is: What is in your life’s blueprint? This is a most important and crucial period in your lives. For what you do now and what you decide now at this age may well determine which way your life shall go. Whenever a building is constructed, you usually have an architect who draws a blueprint, and that blueprint serves as the guide for those who are to build the building. A building is not well erected without a good, sound, and solid blueprint.

Now, each of you is in the process of building the structure of your lives, and the question is whether you have a proper, a solid, and a sound blueprint.

I want to suggest some of the things that should be in your life’s blueprint. Number one in your life’s blueprint should be a deep belief in your own dignity, your own worth, and your own somebodiness. Don’t allow anybody to make you feel that you are nobody. Always feel that you count. Always feel that you have worth, and always feel that your life has ultimate significance.

Secondly, in your life’s blueprint, you must have as the basic principle the determination to achieve excellence in your various fields of endeavor. You’re going to be deciding as the years unfold what you will do in life – what your life’s work will be. Once you have decided what it will be, set out to do it, and to do it well.

And I say to you, my young friends, that doors are opening to each of you, and the great challenge facing you is to be ready to enter these doors as they open.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great essayist, said in a lecture in 1871 that if a man can write a better book or preach a better sermon or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, even if he builds his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.

And when you discover what you are going to be in your life, set out to do it as if God Almighty called you at this particular moment in history to do it. Do that job so well that the living, the dead, or the unborn couldn’t do it any better.

If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures. Sweep streets like Beethoven composed music. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper.

If you can’t be a pine on the top of the hill, be a shrub in the valley. But be the best little shrub on the side of the hill. Be a bush if you can’t be a tree. If you can’t be a highway, just be a trail. If you can’t be the sun, be a star for it isn’t by size that you win or you fail. Be the best of whatever you are.

Finally, in your life’s blueprint, there must be a commitment to the eternal principles of beauty, love, and justice. Don’t allow anybody to pull you so low as to make you hate them. Don’t allow anybody to cause you to lose your self-respect to the point that you do not struggle for justice. However young you are, you have a responsibility to seek to make your nation a better nation in which to live, and you have a responsibility to seek to make life better for everybody. So you must be involved!”

So what is membership in the National Junior Honor Society? It is a beginning. It is an acceptance of responsibility. It is a step to a whole new level of challenge. It is a recognition that your experiences up until now have prepared you for something greater.

Are you familiar with “Ubuntu”? U-B-U-N-T-U. You may remember I speak of it each year. I love the concept, so I am going to retell the story:

During a stay with an African tribe, an anthropologist was spending time with a group of children of the tribe. He had an idea for a simple game, so he proposed it to them. He took a basket of fruit and placed it next to a tree on one side of a field then had the children follow him to the other side of the field. He explained that they would race one another across the field, and that whichever child reached the basket first would win all the fruit.

Now I’m going to give you a moment to make a silent prediction about what happened next.

Like many of us here might expect, the anthropologist expected the children to compete with one another. Instead, when he said go, the children all took each other’s hands and ran together. When they reached the fruit basket, they encircled it, then sat together with each of them enjoying the fruits. When the anthropologist asked why they ran the way they did instead of competing so one child could have won all the fruit for him or herself, they responded, “Ubuntu, how can one of us be happy if all the others are sad?”

“Ubuntu” is a philosophy of African tribes that can be summed up as “I am who I am because we are who we are.” It is a fundamental recognition that every individual is part of something bigger, that we are better when we take care of each other, that we can achieve far more as a team than we can alone, that it is through our relationships with one another that we become the individuals we are. It is the very essence of stewardship, which is a word that I believe captures the very heart of all of the values of NJHS. What is stewardship? Put simply, stewardship is “duty of service.” But stewardship is not that simple. Stewardship means stepping into the role of the one responsible for the care of the community of which you are a part—your home, your school, your neighborhood, your city, your country, your world—and turning your focus outward to understand and serve the needs of others before yourself. As Dr. King said, “you have a responsibility to seek to make life better for everybody.”

Each year I like to present the members of NJHS with a challenge. This year’s challenge is about both character and service in a world where those two things often go unrecognized.

We live in a world where virtually everything that happens happens in the public view. Unfortunately, we are bombarded by the noise of people behaving badly, even people who we would traditionally consider to be great role models. Politicians, business people, religious leaders, educators, police …

It easy to begin to think the world is a bad place filled with bad people, that everything is going down the tubes. It is easy to look at social media and television and the internet and find evidence everywhere that the world is becoming a worse place.

Then I look at you. You are the antidote to the noise. You are the ones who remind us every day that the world is actually filled with goodness and right. Unfortunately, good doesn’t make as much noise.

So here is my challenge to you. Engage with life!

What does it mean to engage? Look people in the eye; give your full focus; pay attention to nuance; think critically; evaluate evidence; question information. So begin by disengaging from the version of the world being portrayed on and through screens, and take a hard look at the actual world you are occupying. When you do that, it’s not hard to find examples of good and right. I know I do every day when I come into this building.

Then find the courage to be the ones to stand against the tide. Just because it’s on TV, or the internet, or social media … even when it is coming in waves, does not mean it should define how you see the world or how you interact with it. Use a critical eye and ask the questions … is this right? Is this good? If the answer is no, then do not emulate what you see. Turn away from it. Then make a decision to interact with the world in a positive and powerful way, to have the courage to stand for what is right and good, and to provide service to the world by being the best person you can be. What our world will look like in the future will be defined by you. That’s a big responsibility. So, how will you serve the future world?

Sometimes service is monumental; it makes history; Dr. King changed the world … and that matters. And sometimes service is a drop in a bucket that fills bit by bit, day after day, until suddenly it is full, even overflowing with the daily acts of service by a collective group of committed people; you all can change the world … and that matters.

So, how will you serve the future world? That’s not an easy question to answer, but to answer it you must be engaged. You must buy into the core principle of Ubuntu, of service to others. Recognize that once you accept the mantle of membership in National Junior Honor Society, that’s when the real work—the meaningful work—begins. Everything up until now laid the groundwork for what you can become. Your foundation is strong. But now I challenge you to commit yourselves to becoming stewards of your community, both the local one and the global one, to become protectors of our core values, to become caretakers of your environment, and to live in service of others. In other words, to engage with life! Abiding by the pillars of NJHS, you will be able to do just that, even when it’s hard.

I will close by again using Dr. King’s words. He believed all of our lives have purpose, and that we are all called to serve others. He believed in Ubuntu. In order to fulfill that purpose, we need a blueprint, and that even then there will be times when we must persevere in order to serve the greater good. He said, “We must keep moving. We must keep going. If you cannot fly, run. If you cannot run, walk. If you cannot walk, crawl, but by all means, keep moving!”