What Does It Mean for the Individual? Can You, Personally, Afford To Miss This Opportunity?

The results of the June 13 Trump-Kim summit in Singapore have now “made official” the enormous changes which have occurred in this world at an ever-faster pace, ever since the end of the Twentieth Century—changes which have in large part been catalyzed by the ideas fashioned by Lyndon LaRouche, and by the world leadership role of his wife Helga. This Friday, June 22, Executive Intelligence Review will republish a key article by Lyndon LaRouche from July 18, 1999, titled, “Can You Personally Survive This Bust?” On that same red-lined date of June 22, William F. Wertz, Jr., and Dennis Speed will begin the first of an eight-part series of classes on LaRouche’s economics in Manhattan.

For such reasons, today we should add another question to that one which Lyndon LaRouche asked almost 19 years ago in EIR. This one is, “Can you, personally, afford to miss this opportunity?”

In the face of the greatest developments of world history like those that confront us now, there is a strong tendency to view the human individual—at least the individual who is not currently in the newspaper headlines—as merely one among a group, whether smaller or larger. One of the “gang.” “One of the boys.” But that is not true. That is not human nature.

For all its limitations, the balance of the truth lies instead with the insight that many call “Scriptural”—the view which says that I came into this world naked and alone, as I will sooner or later leave it naked and alone, to give an account of what use I have made of what LaRouche has called my “pilgrimage to mortality.” This is the more truthful human nature, as painters of Egypt were portraying it many centuries before Moses was born.

This is grippingly illustrated by the circumstances of the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott of 1955-56, where Martin Luther King, Jr., was first thrust as if by chance into a leadership position he never asked for, and then suddenly forced to fight through his own anguished crisis of confidence, before he could actually begin to lead.

As David J. Garrow recounts it in his 1986 King biography, Bearing the Cross, none of the established Black leaders of Montgomery were eligible to lead the new movement to boycott the city’s buses for their mistreatment of Blacks, because of the aggravated lines of personal-factional cleavage which divided those leaders. If one faction grabbed the position of president of the new association, the others might not fully support the boycott. The mutually-hostile factions settled on the very young Dr. King, the newcomer, if only because he had not yet had the time to attract personal grudges and resentments. One faction-leader told a friend that the Rev. King, although he was extremely well-educated and an articulate speaker, did look “more like a boy than a man” at his 26 years of age.

When Rev. King was the only one nominated for president, his closest friend, Rev. Ralph Abernathy, fully expected him to decline. Instead, after a pause, he answered, “Well, if you think I can render some service, I will,” and accepted.

Returning home that evening less than an hour before the mass meeting at which he would deliver the major speech, Dr. King pondered what he could tell the people at the rally. Realizing he could not prepare any remarks, he “became possessed by fear” and “obsessed by a feeling of inadequacy,” as he later wrote. Prayer somewhat calmed his fears, but he was still unsure about what he should say to the thousands who had already gathered outside to hear him.

In celebrating Dr. King as we have just done again in Manhattan, we celebrate our real human nature. LaRouche and those who fight alongside him are the indispensable leadership for humanity. This is our opportunity, one that will never recur.