Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is certainly evidence of how much wisdom can be packed into a dream. Many things that he could only dream about in the past are now no longer figments of the imagination, but reality and fact. I am certainly no Martin Luther King Jr., but I had a dream too. My dream began in a humble spot on some bleachers, like the kind on a football field. There were only a few people there, a speaker with a very small audience. Though his audience was small, his words were not.
He was speaking about slavery, about modern day sexual slavery, and it was tragic that only a few were there to listen. In a flash, I then beheld a victim of sexual slavery. I told this person that I was only able to help a little, but I could let them stay in a spare room that I had, for short time, to be safe for a moment from the horror of being a sexual slave. Next, I saw another man, no victim of sexual slavery. However, this person was inspired by my small action to help the first victim, and he did much more. I saw him skillfully sneaking into a large and highly guarded structure… sort of like a scene from Ocean’s 11. He found a girl who was so bruised that her entire body was blue. How horrible her injury was, I thought, that it turned her body into a different color. He took her in his arms, and with great skill and risk to himself, carried her out of hostile territory.
There is a lot of wisdom in these images. The epidemic of sexual slavery is taken seriously by only a few, just as the speaker in my dream had only a few in his audience. Likewise, when the slavery of African-Americans went on, few people took it seriously enough to really try to stop it. We might say to ourselves, “if I were around back then, I would have done what I could to stop it.” However, with modern sexual slavery going on now, we do have a chance to stop it… now. We might be overwhelmed, thinking that it is impossible to make any real difference with the situation. We might consider the great difficulty that there is in stopping a force that seems so powerful.
However, we must remember that this doubt is, in the end, rooted in a downright lie. Small actions can make a huge difference. Just as in my dream all I did was to help a victim of sexual slavery for a few hours, this action, though small, inspired someone to heroically save a tormented girl from a securely guarded prison. How small things can make a big difference is certain from the case of Rosa Parks, the African-American whose act of refusing to get up from her seat to give it to a white passenger made her the “mother of the civil rights movement.”
What a great tree can grow from the tiniest of seeds. Start small, but do something, and you will inspire another, and it won’t stop growing, and together we will defeat this monster of sexual slavery. Its power is its myth, the myth that our actions are insignificant if they are not gigantic. A little warmth from the sun melts a lot of snow, so let us let our little lights shine, and let us do our little acts, and we will together take down a monster.
~ Jeff Ganim, 24 ~
Recent College Graduate/Retail Sales Associate
