Oprah’s Special: The Dream Lives
I really enjoyed The Dream Lives Special Presentation on today’s Oprah Winfrey Show. If you missed it you can read the stories on the website or even pre-order a copy of the presentation on DVD. It was inspiring to view stories about interracial relationships, the history of civil rights in the United States, and ways of how everyday people today are living Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of freedom and unity.
The last story was of how a bus driver in Los Angeles, Tanya, encouraged her students to improve their grades. She started an organization where she drove the children around and took them on trips to view places around the world, places like civil rights sites and “a marine biology cruise just a short ride away from the inner city”.
Tanya explained, “…a few of my students pulled me to the side and said, ‘Miss Walters, I didn’t realize there was a life outside my community,'” she says. “And that gave me the strength to know that I had a purpose in life.”
Tanya said that the trips began to change the children. She says, “They’re able to link history together, and I think that’s what our youth need right now is to know that people came from all walks of background and [have] struggled for all different reasons.”
“They go through life, and they think that they can’t achieve. They think that they won’t amount to anything. And it’s not such!” Tanya says. “My goal, when I bring our kids together, is for them to dream again, for them to bring back hope. Because when you have hope, you have determination.”
Watching that last story strung a cord in me, and made me begin to think about what could be done to help younger people, like those I saw everyday in my inner-city community in South Florida, keep dreaming. I think its so true that if young people don’t know what’s possible or what’s beyond the walls of their neighborhoods, they can’t really dream to full extent. Without dreams, there’s nothing to strive toward, nothing to wish for, nothing to drive one to keep going.
Langston Hughes said it the best in his poem:
Hold fast to dreams, For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird, That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams, For when dreams go
Life is a barren field, Frozen with snow.
– Langston Hughes
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Note: I’ll be taking a short hiatus from posting, because of my workload at school and business. I’ll be back the last week of February with all new posts!
