An Inescapable Network of Mutuality

"We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way God's universe is made; this is the way it is structured.

John Donne caught it years ago and placed it in graphic terms: "No man is an island entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main." And he goes on toward the end to say, "Any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind; therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." We must see this, believe this, and live by it if we are to remain awake through a great revolution," says Christian Minister and Civil Rights Activist Martin Luther King, Jr., in his Remaining Awake Through A Great Revolution speech.

In America we are being diminished by the deaths through abortion of a baby boy or a baby girl every 30 seconds. Since 1973 when abortion was legalized in America, more than 55 million babies have been killed. Since China's one-child policy was implemented in the 1970s more than 336 million babies have been killed by abortion; that's more Chinese baby boys and baby girls have lost their lives to abortion than the combined total population of the United States of America and Australia. 

Chen Guangcheng, a blind lawyer who in April 2012 escaped from house arrest in China, is now in the United States studying, writing a book and engaging in human rights activism. Guangcheng played a key role in exposing forced abortions and forced sterilizations in China. On Tuesday he testified before a subcommittee of the U.S. House Committee On Foreign Affairs about his family's persecution in China and other ongoing human rights abuses in China. Guangcheng gave Congress a list of 130,000 Chinese officials involved in forced abortions and forced sterilizations.

"If you have the feeling that something is wrong, don't be afraid to speak up," says Japanese Fred Korematsu who resisted the forced detention of Japanese Americans during World War II.

The fight for Japanese-American justice took from the 1940s until 1988 when Congress passed and former President Ronald Reagan signed legislation which apologized for the internment and said that the government's actions were based on "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership." The US government eventually dispersed more than $1.6 billion in reparations to Japanese Americans interned and their heirs. Each citizen who had been interned was awarded $20,000.

Should African Americans receive reparations because of African American slavery in the US? What about the unborn once Roe v. Wade legalizing abortion in America is overturned and China's one-child policy is stopped?

Martin Luther King, Jr., taught personal, social and economic freedom and justice. In his Remaining Awake Through A Great Revolution speech he says, "In 1863 the Negro was told that he was free as a result of the Emancipation Proclamation being signed by Abraham Lincoln. But he was not given any land to make that freedom meaningful....

Every court of jurisprudence would rise up against this, and yet this is the very thing that our nation did to the black man. It simply said, "You're free," and it left him there penniless, illiterate, not knowing what to do. And the irony of it all is that at the same time the nation failed to do anything for the black man, though...Congress was giving away millions of acres of land in the West and the Midwest. Which meant that it was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor."

Everyone needs the right to live, survive and thrive. Proverbios 31:8 Biblia Bilingue Version Reina-Valera 1960 dice, "Abre tu boca por el mudo en el juicio de todos los desvalidos." The Bilingual Bible New King James Version says, "Open your mouth for the speechless, in the cause of all who are appointed to die."