Dr. Patrick Treacy’s speech on Michael Jackson’s humanitarianism at Gardner St. Elementary School Los Angeles (Oct 2010)

Fifty-three years ago, a young black boy was born in a small town in Indiana. This was a different time, a time when the African-American Civil Rights Movement tried to gain freedom from oppression by white Americans. It was also a time when the next generation of post-war Americans was growing up, the sons of soldiers who had freed prisoners from the tyranny of prison camps like Auschwitz and Buchenwald, a time when all of Europe was filled with a profound and abiding gratitude to the American people. As Elie Wiesel, a survivor of the Jewish Holocaust said in a speech to an important gathering of White House dignitaries in 1999 `Gratitude is what defines the humanity of the human being’. And gratitude is what we should now have today for that young American black boy. His name was Michael Jackson, someone I am privileged to call my friend, somebody who often stood alone to fend for the children in the world, for the destitute, for the victims of disease and injustice. Michael was very troubled by the suffering he saw in the world and even more to the indifference to it. His first words to me when we met were `Thank you so much for helping the people of Africa’. There were no airs and graces, no pomp and circumstance and his only concern was for the lives of other people who lived on a different continent than the one in which either of us was born.
I had been to Africa and seen the devastation of the plague of HIV at first hand and when we discussed it, there were tears in his eyes and he said we had to do something together for the people of Africa. Michael Jackson felt that pain, not just for the hungry children, but for himself. He was never indifferent and brought light where there was darkness, hope where there was despair; he never turned away from cruelty when he could give compassion. There are times when we all feel God has abandoned this world, the terrible earthquake in Haiti where bodies were cut from building by hacksaw, the funeral undertakers in Zambia where the coffin-makers work banging nails in wood late into the night, the streets of Northern Ireland where throats are cut for pronouncing a word with the wrong accent. I have lived in Baghdad, been a prisoner of Saddam Hussein, carry the war wounds of Northern Ireland and I say to you here today that there is a God who looks down on all of this wrong and he brought us Michael Jackson to help to solve it. Let’s be grateful to God that he sent us such an angel to live amongst us for a while and let us not be indifferent to the wrongs we see around us.

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