Meaning of Life: Achieving Joy



Posted: Wednesday, July 11, 2007

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For me, the meaning of life is to reach a level of maturity where you understand that none of us will become who we were meant to be until all of us achieve equality: economically, educationally, spiritually, racially. There was one man in American history that believed the same thing: Martin Luther King, Jr. For the past 9 years, I have tried to make the world a better place by voluntarily creating, publishing, and monitoring my interactive and educational website: the "Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Scavenger Hunt." The site (located at tstrong.com) is my tribute to Dr. King's life and his philosophy. I keep this site up because I believe that Dr. King's dream to have this country live up to its creed: "that all men were created equal" is a dream yet unfulfilled. It is crucial for all of us to attain this dream/goal if we are ever going to be the free, equal, and democratic society we profess to be

I have designed my site so that people can discover for themselves what a remarkable man Dr. King was by asking open-ended questions and providing links where the answer might be found. After visitors go on the scavenger hunt, they can publish their own tribute to Dr. King by publishing to the site. People can write in the guestbook, and they can send me poems, pictures, essays, and even music, which I then add to the site. In reality, the site is no longer my creation, but the creation of all who have contributed to it. Ideally, everyone who participates in the site may find his or her own meaning of life within King’s nonviolent philosophy.

I feel the site has made the world a better place. It celebrates a man who believed in the goodness of all people, and who believed that the promised land of equality and dignity would be possible for all if we were willing to work for it. I have received thousands of guestbook entries where people have recorded how much they were touched by Dr. King, how they learned so many things they never knew about him before, and who had come to understand how Dr. King changed the world--using nonviolence.

We're living in a world now that seems to bent on studying violence, on squelching diverse points of views, and on increasing inequality. I like to think my site keeps alive another way of thinking, offers the hope that a better way of doing things might some day come into being, because that is the only way for all of us to find our own joy—our own meaning of life.

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Top-level comments on this article: (1 total)
» left by Anonymous from Ann Arbor, Michigan 4 years 192 days ago.
Hi: I'm not sure how your article related to the meaning of life?
» left by 4 years 191 days ago.
Thanks for the question. Read it again.
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