“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny,” the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” in 1963. “Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
President Barack Obama’s inaugural address echoed that sentiment among other things: “We know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself.”
