When America loses a leader, we gather, grieve, and remember. When we lose three great leaders in just a few short months, though, we cannot help but be stunned by the magnitude of what has passed.
Rosa Parks, Coretta Scott King and Betty Friedan were more than just role models or cultural icons; each represented the greatest ideals of a generation that believed social justice was not only possible but vital. Theirs was not the easy path, but the path of struggle and sacrifice, and our debt to them is profound.
We are tempted, when eulogizing heroes, to thank them for their service and presume their life's work to be complete. Parks, King and Friedan are indeed responsible for extraordinary gains in civil and women's rights, but their lives are a testament to the fact that we cannot rest, we cannot grow complacent, while injustice and inequality still shadow our national soul.
Activism has gone out of style. Noble ideals receive plenty of lip service among Americans, particularly when our patriotic buttons are being pushed in anticipation of an election or a war; however, when it comes to committing our lives to fighting for a more just and united America, volunteers are few indeed.
But there is much to fight for. Forty years after Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King helped make the Voting Rights Act a reality, our democracy is still tainted by the shameful disenfranchisement of minorities. Forty years after Betty Friedan diagnosed our unequal treatment of women in The Feminine Mystique, our lawmakers are eagerly chipping away at hard-won workplace and reproductive rights for American women. Fifty years after Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus, our poor and disadvantaged students are increasingly isolated in broken-down public schools that grow more separate and unequal with each passing day. Over thirty years after Coretta Scott King founded the King Center to advocate nonviolence amid the turmoil of Vietnam, we are once again stuck in a war that's hurting our security - and with no end in sight.
I believe it is important to honor these leaders we have lost, but to honor them is more than merely to praise the lives they lived or preach the beliefs they held; what America needs most is for us to take up the causes they fought for. If there is something to be gained by the loss of these leaders, it is a renewed sense of purpose and public engagement in the nation they left behind, the nation they loved enough to demand that it be true to its promises. We are a country in search of a conscience, and we cannot count on the ruling party to provide one. It is up to us. Rosa Parks, Coretta Scott King and Betty Friedan stood up for what is right. If they can do it, so can we.
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