as commencement nears

I'm about to graduate with my Master's Degree in Urban Planning from MIT. Someone recently recommended J.K. Rowling's commencement speech at Harvard a few years back. Here is a snippet that touched me on how our internal states can affect external worlds:

One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.  

That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.

 - J K Rowling  (full speech available here)

from mr grover's facebook page to here

They miss the whisper that runs
any day in your mind,
"Who are you really, wanderer?"
And the answer you have to give no matter how dark and cold the world around you is; "Maybe I'm a king." 

-from A Story That Could Be True, by William Stafford

MLK JR / April 1967

On this day with the freshness of the Black Lives Matter movement all around us, the concern over injury and loss suffered as a result of words and cartoons with the recent Charlie Hebdo tragedy and while I am sitting in the middle of Uttar Pradesh, India with its own injustices at hand, the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. continue to apply. This is one piece I have never read -- when he speaks about the injustice inherent in the Vietnam War and the USA's role in the war. 

Below are snippets. The full piece is powerful; find it here. 

It is with such activity that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on to the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin, we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

- - - - -

 A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see than an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. 

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A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

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A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.