The One Is Indivisible
The Truth Is The Whole

Probably not believable, but true: I visited Karenga at his storefront office in Watts early in 1968, alone, at the request and arrangement of several Black students at the university where I served as Assistant Chaplain and a dorm dad.  The students were astonished I went through with it, alone in Watts.  I asked Karenga for his help on a project I would soon join back in New York.  He said he would but later went quiet, at least to me.  BTW, they did not all wear dashikis, at least not the two bodyguards who stood at my sides as I sat talking with Karenga, who was behind a desk in front of me.  Eastwood and his set designer got much of the look and feel of Karenga’s Watts storefront office in the storefront office of Big Ed Mustapha in the movie The Enforcer.

I did not feel under threat while I visited Karenga.  I did not at the time realize that the large men who came out to the sidewalk to meet me, told me to park directly in front of their door, ushered me in and out of Karenga’s office, and stood at my sides during the interview were bodyguards.  The students had asked me to address the man I visited as Maulana or Maulana Ron Karenga, and I did.  He was courteous to me, expected deference, but was in no way menacing or intimating future actions of his.  He may have been working on Kwanza conceptuality at that time, but it had not appeared yet, or, I had not heard of it.

Three years earlier, from a freeway on a trip to LAX, I observed plumes of smoke rising from Watts.  It was a world unknown to me but assumed by me to be human and I have never wavered from that assumption.  Different from me in incidentals, but human like me in fundamentals.  Fundamentals always have appealed to me more than incidentals do.  I did not and do not understand why someone would burn down their town.  Maybe someone stampeded them into doing that.  I just do not know, still.

Early in 1966, as we strolled together on a snowy Riverside Drive sidewalk, he holding my arm for steadiness, I replied breezily to Reinhold Niebuhr when he asked what I thought of this integration problem, as he put it: Oh, said I, it will happen very quickly.  He got angry on the spot, stopped walking, turned to me and said, No, you are wrong, it will take a very long time, if ever.  I was taken aback at his vehemence and, as I felt it, his ignorance.

Only recently did I realize we spoke at cross-purposes, to different points.  I meant employment integration would happen quickly.  He meant cultural integration would take very long to happen and was perhaps impossible.  We both were right, but he was right only with respect to the impossibility of cultural integration that he divined for the future.  By integration Rheiny meant Blacks living like Whites live, assumptions, habits, and all.  That is not happening, nor should it.  American includes Black, which itself is a mixture of numerous elements, to include Scots-Irish, French Canadian, and Afro-Carib.

It is not wrong to love children.  But parents should learn how to love them.  Whenever the children go astray, wittingly or unwittingly, parents should hasten to correct their faults and bring them to the righteous path.  The obligations of parents do not end with providing food, schooling and knowledge on worldly matters.  Children should also be provided with right values.  They should not be made to think that the acquisition of wealth is the be-all and end-all of life.  Wealth does not accompany one when they leave the world.  Wealth is necessary only for meeting one’s essential needs.  Too much wealth is an embarrassment like an oversized shoe.  Too little of it is likely to be painful, like a tight-fitting shoe.  So it is desirable to have only that amount of wealth that is adequate for one’s basic needs.  It is deplorable that in the mad pursuit of money, people are forgetting or compromising human virtues.

Sathya Sai Baba – Divine Discourse, February 5, 1984

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