Ever have one of those moments...

Have you ever had one of those moments where you feel like the problems you have or the worries you have are so minuscule in the scope of the world? It's like a huge slap in the face when you realize your life has not been bad at all. This semester I am so thankful to have taken the Women and Religion course at UD. It has opened my eyes to so many things I would have never experienced.
Tonight, the first showing ever of a new documentary was shown in Sears Recital Hall. It is called The Sisters of Selma, and it will be aired on PBS in 2007. It is about the Civil Rights Movement, specifically in Selma, Alabama. It shows the Catholic nuns and priests who marched along with the blacks for the right to vote. Joyce Hart is the producer. She was in Sears tonight. So was one of the first black nuns, Sister Antona, who also marched in Alabama. She is now over 80 years-old and still, as she said, "uppity." She is one of those people who you just have to be in awe over. One of those people who can quietly command a room, who can speak her mind, who is an amazing human being.
I feel like coming from a school district with the majority being white students, I never really got the full weight of the Civil Rights Movement. We were basically taught that they marched and gathered quietly. We learned some stuff about Martin Luther King, Jr., but there was no substance to what we were learning about. Tonight, for the first time, I experienced the full weight of the movement. I got to see white police officers beating their fellow human beings with batons and spraying them with tear gas. I saw black men being carried on stretchers and loaded into hearses because blacks did not have ambulance services. I saw black women and children get pushed down and laughed at. How can you treat your fellow humans like that? All they were doing was exercising their rights. They wanted the rights everyone else had, and that they had been denied for hundreds of years. Plus, I do not understand the crime of wanting to walk across a bridge and being denied that right. They never hurt anyone and they never were violent. Yet they were treated like criminals.
The worst part is the fact that this is still going on in many parts of the world today. This is still going on in our backyards. And it makes me sick to think that anyone could hate someone, someone only for the color of their skin, so much. I applaud the African Americans who marched, who spoke their minds, who stood up and stared the whites in their faces, who rose up from oppression and took matters into their own hands. If only everyone could be so brave.
Which leads me to Martin Luther King Jr. What a man. There is no way I can express how amazing of a person he was.

"Better to go through life with a scarred up body than a scarred up soul." -Martin Luther King, Jr.