In Praise of Dreamers

....and those who make dreams reality

When I was just a kid maybe 5 or 6 we bought a gramaphone record player. We didn’t have many records, Jim Reeves, Welsh Male Voice Choir, Growing up with Wally Wyton( which included the classic song “Never shove your Granny off the Bus” – sorry but the current “Wheels on the bus go round and round” just doesn’t cut it with regard to setting the moral compass of a generation – more a post modern sing song, value free with lack of overaching metanarrative- complete nonsense), and (the point of starting this blip write up in the parlour of my childhood) an LP vinyl of speeches by Martin Luther King Jnr. So strangely on the west coast of Cumberland where TV was still black and white and only broadcast for a meager few hours a day I could recite whole stanza’s of those great speeches “I have a dream…” and from there began my encounter with one of the great injustices of our time – that of racism.
 
So today Matt and I headed down to “that London” with the prime purpose of seeing England play Lithuania at Wembley in the evening. Having enjoyed a late lunch with him and the lovely Shannon who had just finished exams and term, I left her to take him clothes shopping (poor lad- he, like a lamb to the slaughter). I went to the photographers gallery to see the exhibtion Human Rights, Human Wrongs.
 
Over 2 floors in the gallery, photo after photo told a story of the years I have crawled and walked this planet. From the civil rights movement in US, to genocide in Ruanda, via South America to colonial and post colonial Africa. Of the many things that struck me as I went from picture to picture with a good number of others also viewing was that I didn’t hear one word spoken by others in the gallery. Partly that was related to the material but also I think to do with our own internal dialogues and stories. For me one of listening as a small child to “I have a dream” along side the social norms of the 60’s and 70’s (I’d spoken to one person of colour in my life when I left home to go to Uni in 1980!). The power of image to connect with our own stories and those of others was striking.
 
Throughout the exhibition were portraits of Nobel Prize Winners over decades, reminding us that thishas been and remains a long struggle. One picture surprised me so much it will stay with me. It was taken in Nicuragua, Sandanista guerillas with guns in hand, cigarettes in their mouths had a white family lined up in front of their house with their back to them. I had already worked out the story of what would happen next (how wrong I was!) and almost turned away at the horror of it, but then caught a narrative written next to the photo, they – the Sandanistas then bought three chickens from the family and paid for them to be cooked by the women of the house… and then left them in peace.
 
   
As I took this photo, in the background behind me Kings final speech played where amongst other things he predicts his own death (he was assassinated soon after), he says “I’ve been to the mountain top, I’ve seen the promised land”. I’m not yet in that promised land but it’s certainly nearer and the journey for all of us continues – thanks to those who have dreams and visions and those who have the courage and dignity to act.