Sometimes it seems as if time has taken a vacation from moving along. It is as if we are in some kind of Groundhog Day movie and the character never learns his lessons. The country continues to take giant steps backwards and half of the people don’t even know that it is happening. It will be a sad day of reckoning coming soon to a neighborhood near you.

It goes without saying that the last century was one marked by great events. It is hardly possible to list all of the achievements and advancements that took place in that short period, so many so that it could be seen as the greatest century of man. But it was also one of the most horrendous periods as well. Charismatic leaders rose and fell and their hordes laid great destruction over much of the civilized lands before they were subdued.

The advances in science and medicine brought great prosperity and created the possibility of providing for many who suffered the ravages of disease and famine. Progress was made in eradicating debilitating illnesses, removing the greatness stumbling block to emerging nations, as their people were able to rise up from the chains of hunger and poverty and begin their journey to self-sustainability. New regional powers came into being and they will be the new forces in the coming generation.

All this will go for naught if we are unable to foster a true sense of globalization. Far too much effort has been given to end up in a place that will dooms us to confrontation and discord. But that is where we are heading.

Much of the progress in social assimilation is being destroyed by am effort to assign labels to everyone and everything. People are being assigned labels for race, creed, religion, and any other defining behaviors or traits. The world is becoming the ultimate blond joke. We are emerging as a world defined by groups, no longer seen as individuals or respected by achievement and growth. For too much emphasis is being placed on what we are instead of who we are. And this is leading us to a very dangerous place.

During the mid point of the 20th century, many writers recognized this phenomenon and their writings have become a blueprint for today’s troubles. From Animal Farm we learn that although all creatures are the same, some creatures are better than others. In Brave New World, we find that going along for the sense of belonging leaves one empty and forgotten. In the Lord of the Flies, rivalry leads to violence and death. All of these stories have their foundation in a misplaced belief in equality and each fails in its own way to find this elusive goal. Once lost there is no way for anyone to find it again.

There is a new movie out on the Jackie Robinson story. It is written as a morality play and the characters do more than just convey the story of braking down the color line. The movie begins with a scene in the owner’s office. Gathered there are the owner, his PR man, and his head baseball scout. When the owner states that he wishes to add a black player to his team, the other two begin to raise objections, “It’s never been done before, What will the players do, What will the press say, etc., etc.” Each one of the objections makes sense and their arguments are good. But then the owner has an answer that surprises them. He says that he just wants to put the best team he can on the field to win and he knows that without having black players he is not doing all that he can to do it.

The scout is tasked with finding the right player who can not only play ball on the field but is ready to play ball off the field with the press and baseball. It is not going to be easy to overcome all the negative pressure that will surely come his way. Robinson had played baseball at UCLA on an integrated team and had served in the armed forces during WWII so he was chosen. He was invited to New York and the proposal was made: one year in the minors and then if all went well, a call up for the following year. There was never any discussion about whether or not his play would be good enough, only if his character was strong enough for him to persevere through the insults, name-calling and other misbehaviors directed at him.

The movie does a great job of matching triumph over trials while showing the great depths that all those involved traversed to complete their own personal journey of courage. Each player, coach, writer and executive has a moment of clarity when they realize that whatever it was that they feared, the reality was not in what they thought and they embraced their part in the bigger story. In the end, each one saw the saga in a light that could not be dimmed and its radiance kindled a flame of hope.

Jackie Robinson’s story created a legacy that has been corrupted by those who have followed in his footsteps. While at the time this one act set the stage for teams to seek out the best players to use regardless of their color and put them on the same field to play the same game, it has led to a false celebration of firsts in many different ways. If Robinson had failed, it is unlikely that we would still have the Negro Leagues. Another player would have been chosen and integration still would have happened. Baseball wanted to field the best it could and it was going to do just that: put the best players it could find on the field to win.

It was only a short time later that the Civil Rights movement began in earnest. The early leaders faced obstacles greater than merely fielding a good team on a field; they were in a battle to erase the idea that somehow the color of one’s skin could determine their abilities to think, work and achieve. The stigma of being less than, of being an inferior creation, was the dogma of the South. It mattered little to many what one or two could accomplish, it was a belief among many that needed to be changed. And it was not going to be easy to persuade them.

Martin Luther King is honored as one of the great leaders of this movement. His story has been chronicled at length and has been lifted up and torn down throughout the years since his passing. There are those who would raise him up as a standard bearer overlooking some of his humanness and place him on a pedestal. There are others who only see him as an agitator and seek to use him as an instrument of division. Neither one of these truly represents what the man was and stood for. The short story is that he saw an injustice and believed that he could change it. Throughout his writings he sought to find a balance that would bring about a new way of thinking and acting so that each person would be able to stand on his own and achieve anything that they were capable to do.

He would be appalled at what has happened to the movement that he fostered. His greatness hope was expressed in his “I have a dream” speech. His wish was that his children would grow up in a world where character would be the sole judge of a person’s capacity and worth. Instead we find ourselves in a society so riddled with labels that no one can stand up without being assigned some foolish name or designation. There are labels for color, labels for sexual choice, labels for political persuasion, labels for suffering of mental health, labels of sufferers of physical ailments, labels for this, labels for that. And every label has some intrinsic value that has been assigned to it by the label-makers, those whose dedication to preserving their status of holding the torch for the label has blinded them from seeing the damage that they are doing. Some of the labels are seen as good and their holder are rewarded by special privileges such as hiring preferences and test score adjustments while other are saddles with labels of scorn and ridicule. We have become a nation, not of one people and one national sense but a collection of factions working against each other.

Over two hundred years ago a president spoke out against idea of hyphenated Americans. It was at the height of the first great wave of immigration to this country from Europe. These people came from famine and want to be here and share in the hope that was America. He spoke against the idea that these settlers would become isolated by their place of birth and instead embraced the idea first expressed by the founding fathers in the motto: One out of Many. First applied to unite the separate colonies into the union, he now saw it as the rallying cry to unite the newcomers with those who had been here for what was then many generations. Given the opportunity to success and prosper, many put aside the old ways and became Americans, embracing their new home and all its responsibilities.

Ours has always been a country that believes in self-determination. Even before the Revolution, the colonies were well on the way to supporting themselves, in fact, it was because of this that the British were able to tax them at all. They had long since needed the government to support them and their industry and commerce had become the rival of the British. They flourished because they believed in themselves and were willing to do what it took to be successful. This is our legacy.

Each time that we put a label on someone we diminish them. No one need to be identified by their groupings, no one need to be a special something other than them. Somewhere out there there is a person trapped inside a label that they did not choose or want. Instead of being seen as who they are they are saddled with what they are. It makes no sense to limit or coddle someone solely based on some outside label. It lessens both the one who is labeled and the one who assigns them the label.

It is time to throw away the label maker and let each person be judged as an individual. There is no way to guarantee that everyone will be successful at their chosen calling but we do a disservice to all when we do not let them try. It is well past time that we realize how much damage has been done to those whose life have been dictated to them by false labels and out-dated stereotypes. We do more damage to our collective whole each day that this continues. The best way to honor the memories of our ancestors will be to follow in their example and embrace their zeal and passion for the American dream, remembering that it was by their individual struggle that we were able to rise above the differences and achieve the distinction that is our promise.