A Network of Mutuality

A Network of Mutuality

At the beginning of every school year, my students gathered to talk about classroom rules. After reviewing the usual list, we’d add one more: In our classroom, we support one another. My second-graders had a lot of ideas about what this meant: We help one another with math. We share our crayons. We pick up someone who falls. We invite our classmates to play.

Building a sense of community is a vital educational strategy. Classmates work together for the benefit of all. When one succeeds, we all succeed. When one fails, we help pick up the pieces. We walk together and leave no one behind. We weave a network of mutual respect and care that we carry forward into our lives.

Sometimes we forget that our fate is connected to the fate of others. What affects one, affects all. Martin Luther King, in a speech in 1968 at the National Cathedral the week before he was assassinated said, “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.”

Our sense of mutuality gets lost when we take sides against one another. In our nation today, we have split into camps — each claiming the right to victory and demanding the defeat of the other. We forget that we are bound together by our mutual rights, as our founding fathers stated, to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We forget that our nation endures because we have mutual goals. When we stop supporting one another, we will all fall.

On the night Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, Robert F. Kennedy, who was campaigning for the presidency, stood before a crowd of his supporters to deliver the terrible news. Kennedy then called for unity: “What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness; but is love and wisdom and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.” 

Our fates are tied together. No one will truly succeed unless all succeed. Love, compassion, and wisdom will bring justice. In a network of mutuality, it is not my justice but our justice. For our nation to endure, we must support one another. Only then will we have justice for all.

Our “garment of destiny” must not be shredded by divisions among us. Our mutuality is “inescapable.” To achieve justice for all we must support our neighbors — new or old. When we employ love, wisdom, and compassion no one will be left behind. 

(Quotations from The Soul of America: The Battles for Our Better Angels by Jon Meacham, Random House 2018)