"I Have a Dream" (w/ Gerald C. Rivers)

Today is Dr Martin Luther King Junior Day in the United States, where we celebrate the life and work of one of our most prodigious leaders in the fight for civil rights. And today I also brought on a mentor and close friend of mine, Mr Gerald C. Reverence. Now. Gerald is a world's renowned voiceover artist, master drummer, and public speaker. You've probably heard his voice before if you saw the Disney three D animated film record Route where

he voiced for m Basson. You probably heard him on countless radio and TV commercials, and have probably even seen him on one or two or many few as well. Um, but he's also the voice of Dr Martin Luther King Jr. And let me tell you, having heard him do a few conditions in the past, let me just say it is powerful because you know, he tortually captures the essence of King's voice and it really resounds in your soul.

So I figure, what better day on the day that we honor Dr Martin Luther King Junior, than I have someone who actually resounds his voice and his message. And as Caryl comes on this episode, we talk about them what it means to have a dream and where you are in relation to the dream that doctor King spoke about almost sixty years ago, and and and it makes you tap into what your dream is. What's the dream

you have for you? All right, listen, you don't have to figure it out right now, you don't have to do Just sit back and relaxed. As we welcome Mr Gerald ce with without further ado, it is my pleasure to welcome Generald Cee Rivers on the Vitamin D right with me. I get excited about, Hey, Mr Gerald c Rivers, what's happening? Having one is happening, Life is happening. It's all good in the neighborhood, in spite of this world

of appearances that wants to suggest something different. I know, right, but you know, just thinking of one, I've been telling people that we have to treat this year like a and one type of season like that. You know, we usually come up with these cute little uh antidotes and rhymes and whatnot for the new year, but like nobody had time to be cute about this one. But you're right, it's m one And I teld people like, we got the vision last year, so now it's the just the

the m one, the action type of thing. You know, you're here, and you know what, with all of this stuff that is going on, it really is an opportunity for us to take some action, to do some things differently because in many ways, clearly the old way wasn't working. It wasn't it wasn't, So we're not trying to go back to something. We're trying to go forward to something. Come on, get holding on. You're right, and you know here's the thing too. Um what wasn't working is for sure.

But one thing I think we had to keep in mind is to really embrace the change that's to come. Yeah. Yeah, And I think more more than just embracing the change, we get to define the change because we have the opportunity to create something new based on all of the madness that has gone on. Come on. I have a thing on my wall in my room that says, I refuse to relinquish the reality of my fantasy because I

cannot escape the fantasy that lives in my reality. So if things as strange as what has happened in this last year can happen, then things that I could believe in that other people would have thought were impossible can happen. To what's gerald you? You started early, you're starting. You know, I didn't even get a chance of war. People like to let them know what kind of conversation we're gonna have today. But I think we gotta ankling because I live in that space. I mean, you know that I'm

you know, I'm one. I'm grateful. I'm grateful for the good and the so called bad, and to every situation that we find ourselves in, whether it looks like that or not, is an opportunity for growth. Every situation that we find ourselves and we have strategically placed ourselves in the position for the greatest potential for growth. Now, whether or not we take advantage of it is something else. But we are always and ever in the position for

the greatest opportunity for our own growth. First, Oh, no, matter what it looks like. You could be in prison, you could be in war, you could be married and bliss, middle of a divorce, losing your house, buying a house, growing up, getting old, getting said, getting well, every opportunity, every situation we find ourselves in, we have put ourselves there for our greatest potential for growth. So this last president put us in the position for our greatest potential

for growth. And you know, some people, uh, whether they be opposed and not in a necessarily for his views essentially make America great. Maybe not again, but finally, let's make America great. I mean, we've seen we're seeing diversity in the White House. We're seeing so many people come forward. We're seeing that. You know, with everything that's happened with COVID, how this moment of paulse has allowed people to see

was really going on. You know, it's like a magnifying glass because all of these things were going on all the time. Anyway, come on, if it shut things down in such a way that, for one, now we have to look at the health care system because it was broken and people are not getting the health care that they needed. Now we have to look at the homeless situation, because all of a sudden, we're scared that the homeless

people can be transmitting AIDS. I mean, not AIGs, but COVID WHOA, yeah right, I'm so afraid of them that remember there was a wireless Oh, we gotta put them in a house. Oh, we've got to find some place for them to be. What if we had had a better health care system to begin with, or had a better plan for dealing with those people that were houseless in this time before this time showed up. What if we had a better plan for caring for the elderly

and the sick before this showed up. All it did was show up and show us how bad the situation really was. And I know that there are some folks who are saying, oh my god, they increased the unemployment and they're giving people these stimulus checks. But when you think about it, if people are getting these checks and they're getting this unemployment and they still can't pay their bills,

but it was like that didn't just happen overnights. And then when you have a host of people and a lot of people who were making what they thought was fairly good money, but you lose your job or you miss one paycheck and we are all a few paychecks away from trying to figure something out frind in the way.

So it really did shina light on healthcare, on homelessness or houselessness, on job inequality, on racism, because if we had not had COVID nineteen when George Floyd had that incident that took place, most of the world, not just this country, but most of the world would just have added him to the list. With Eric Garner, and with Felio Castillo, and with uh Tamir Rice and the long list of library it just would have been added to

the list. But because people were stuck at home, they couldn't go to the bar, they couldn't go to the restaurant, they couldn't go to the dance club, they couldn't go on vacation, they couldn't go to the gym. They were at home, and they were bombarded with this information that many of us have been dealing with on a raygular anyway, So again here we go again. COVID provided us with an opportunity to look at ourselves and to stop with all of the the business that we do to keep ourselves.

We're going to the mall and we're going shopping, buying things often that we do not need. We we don't need them, but we want to compete and we want to show that we can go out and get stuff. But staying at home made everybody watch and made everybody pay attention in a way that they never have before. And I'm gonna say this, and I almost hate to say it, but when young white women got on the front lines with the Black Lives Matter people, the police

treated them differently. I know we can talk about the most recent incident of insurrection and calling it. We need to look at ourselves. We need and we can do better than this, and and doing better it requires us to do the very same thing that you said, to see and really step into the light on the issues that matter, because it's so easy to hide behind the distractions, like you said, shopping what we don't need, going to where you don't go. But when there's nowhere to quote

unquote hide, you're forced to see. Which it's kind of like the segway of what vitamin D is all about. Gerald, It's about sharing the light. And I tell people all the time, we're gonna talk about the good and the bad, because the most important part is that you have to see. And Uh, one thing that I really appreciate is that you were saying about how all of these things are happening right, so much confusion. Some people may call it destruction, but I find it a lot of people are kind

of getting dirty. And I said that dirty with emotions, dirty with different trials and tribulations. But like you said, with anything, you can grow from anything. Heck, even some of the most beautiful exotic flowers, trees, plants in the world need dirt to grow. Not just dirt. There's some of the most beautiful flowers on the planet that require a fire for them to bloom, intense heat at the level of fire and burning and destruction for them to bloom and blossom and be some of the most beautiful

things you've ever seen. And that's part of what we're looking at now. It's like some of it had to burn in order for us to really see the beauty of what was there, which is really that we're more alike than we are different, and that we really want the same things. We ought to be loved, We want to be respected, we want to be trusted, we want to be valued, We want people to like us. We

want our families to be cared for. We want our needs to be met that supersedes any kind of racial, cultural, economic, generational lines. That's what we want. We want to be cared for, and we want to do ultimately, we want to do good because that's our excuse quite often for

being angry. Well, things are so messed up that I'm really piste off right now that there's no way I can think about the good right now because I'm angry about all the stuff that's going I have to tell you, I've been I have two grown children, and we probably talked more this summer than we ever have been the whole time that they were in terms of real talk, in terms of having a conversation with my kids and having them be angry, like they're piste off at the

world that we live in. And they called to say, Dad, we know you've been protesting and you've been on the front lines, and you've been talking about the civil rights and equal rights and human rights and treating people kind for the longest and so we don't know what to do, Like what do we do? And it's like, how can you not get frustrated? I mean, you're talking about sixty and seventy years and it's still the same song. Yeah, well you can't get frustrated. It's okay to get frustrated.

The question is what do you then do with that? Because one option is just to get more frustrated and more angry and add more fuel to the fire. Another option, and this from this is this is important. And because white folks were calling me saying, Gerald, we know you're the voice of Martin Luther King and we want to be an ally. What do we do? And my kids were saying, you know, we want to get out there and be angry and and maybe be destructive, but we want our voices to be heard. What do we do?

And you know what I've been telling people. The first thing you gotta do is self care. So many of us are hurting from wounds and scars that have been with us since we were small children, and we have never healed them. So when something like this comes up, it doesn't just have us angry about what's going on right now. It activates the trauma that we many of or most of us have experienced as children. And now we have a place to direct that anger and that rage.

But it's really not about For some of the folks out there. It wasn't about George Floyd. It was about I'm mad about something else. Now everybody's mad. Now I can be mad too. But when you do the real self care, when you take care of yourself, when you love yourself yourself, when you heal yourself, you have what I can only describe as discernment, so that when you go out there, you know this is my pain and

that ain't mine, that's somebody else's pain. That now we're in this collective mob mentality that we can all be angry about. But when you have that clarity and that discernment, you go. When I'm healed, I don't join any mob that's going on out there that's angry and piste off I I go. I see that they're angry and understand why they're angry, and I wish we could all be at peace. Okay, Well let me jump in Jairo. Now I do love. I love the idealists jump in a circle.

Um let's saying kumbai ya. And I'm saying that to be facetious. But one thing that I I will concur when you were talking about having the anger and the rage, is that it's all stemming from some type of fear, a fear of some type of false evidence, of some type of lack. But Gerald, you know, I have not been on this earth fifty sixty plus years to understand the disparities that's happened, um, you know, to my mother's

generation and grandparents generation. But what I can say and my thirty plus years of life is that it's a little But do we want to say anger aggression? Okay? Because it's about emoting. And I think one thing you you you kept expounding upon self care and as I'll talk about a lot of things I talk about even with Vitamin D principles, and it's something that I every time I'll leave my listeners saying that you are your

greatest asset. And you have to think about your life, bank account, what kind of deposits, what kind of liabilities are you making in your life? Because everything in touch of you is an extension. Right. So when you say, oh, let's not get angry, how can you not be? I'm not saying let's not get angry. I'm saying, when we do get angry, let's find out what we're really angry about. It's easy to join the mass and the mob when everybody is piste off, but they're piste off about one

thing and I'm piste off about something else. When I do that self care, I know that's their stuff, this is my stuff, and I don't have to join in and jump on the bandwagon and pile on when everybody's piste off because it seems like we should be piste off. I'm not saying you can't be piste off. You shouldn't be piste off. We do get piste off. What I'm saying is what do we do with it? What do

you do about it? I don't want to embarrass her, but I was having a conversation with my daughter and she was in New York, and then she went back to Georgia to be with her mom because her mom was going through something, and she said, we're getting a gun and we're going to the driving range, I mean to the shooting range, because we don't know what's going to happen out here. And it just it just ripped

me apart. And I understand that feeling and that reaction, but I grew up in Compton where everybody had a gun, and it didn't solve the problem. You know, people wound up using those guns on other people who looked like them, who looked like us. I mean, and I don't want to go too deep into this, but I was in Compton when the Crips were born, when it was a faction of the Black Panther Party, and the acronym for

Crip was actually a community revolution in progress. And then when you had the FBI and CIA and co Intel pro come in and take the leaders of this movement who were trying to teach black men how to govern themselves and how to police their own communities so that

the police didn't have to come in there. Once you took all of those people out, and it was a strategic plan by the federal government to remove black men from positions of leadership within the black community and turn what should have been a powerful political organization into a street gang. Once you took all that away, now you've got all these brothers who had once learned how to fight and learned how to defend women in the honor

of women. And if you had a brother in one home who was abusive to his wife, you had other black men in that community who would come in and say, brother, you can't do that, Rather than her calling the police and have another man, another black man, locked up. The brothers showed up and said, man, you can't do that. You do, there will be consequences. You can't violate the spirit, because that's just gonna bring the man into this neighborhood

and he's gonna incarceerate more and more of us. But once you take out the men who are teaching these boys how to be men, you just started the whole racist cycle all over again. And then all of a sudden, you have these young men who now have learned how to use weapons, have have felt a little power and a little authority, and and some of that rage, but now there's nobody to direct it towards. Now they think it's all about us, and we can control things, and

we have power and we have right. But without a sound mind and that discernment that you speak of, you can go astray. You wind up doing things that go against the very thing that you ultimately want. And I had a daughter. When black men kill another black man in the neighborhood, both sides are affected. The same as true when Americans go to war in Iran and Afghanistan and Iraq and they come back and they are never

the same. We are not as humans. It is not really our way to go and kill and destroy one another. We be conditioned, we have to be almost brainwashed to the point where we can be humanize another human being in order to take their life. That's what men learn how to do in prison. You go to prison and you say, I gotta be devoid of emotion because I don't want to show weakness. You go into war, you go, I've got to be devoid of emotion because I don't

want to be vulnerable. And so the idea of just responding with aggression has ultimately never served the overall good. What it has served to do is conquer, kill and destroy. Yep, we're gonna take over your land. And what crips and Bloods were doing, they were mirroring what the federal government was doing. It's like you're gonna go into somebody else's land, somebody else's territory, and take over and decide that you

you like, you're a new colonialist. You're gonna go over there and put your flag down and say his mine, I claim this, and forget that there were people already there. Well, here's the thing that's so interesting, Um, you're talking about how the federal government came in and took all the

men leaders. It's something interesting and I um I talked about this on the very first episode of Vitamin D and it was entitled remembering who you Are, because I think oftentimes when you have a disconnection of who you are, that's when you lose that level of discernment. That's where you lose your path or what you're going. That's when you lose your means of standing because you realize you're

falling for anything. And when you're talking about these young men in the community, it only makes sense when you've ripped everything that probably was something to look up to. So now it's kind of like I'm scavenging finding something else to give me power that I can outlash in that range. But this whole notion that you're saying of dealing with these traumas, you know, putting the pieces together, it's like collectively coming through of what your vision for

your life is. What is the vision for your life? What do you want? And I asked people all the time, what do you want? The challenges A lot of people are afraid to ask for they want for ask for what they want because they're afraid they're not going to get it, or is it because they're afraid that they

will both. But as children, there were times when they ask for things and somebody just said, no, you ain't getting that, we can't afford that, you can't have that, you don't deserve that, And it created an eight track tape that was playing over and over in their mind saying you can't have that, we can't afford that, you don't deserve that, and you're not gonna get that, you know, like the joke used to say, when now when you go in the stove, you don't want ship, you ain't

getting ship. Don't ask for you just don't don't touch nothing, do you know what I mean? And that kind of conditioning is atrophy to the soul and the mind to just say no, no, no, no, no no no, no, no no no. So what we did in response the generation of parents that I'm in my fifties, we decided

we weren't going to do that to our kids. We decided, if my kids want something, I'm just gonna give it to them, you know, because they're a kid, and if they're going to school or if they're doing whatever, they should be able to have whatever they want, because when I was a kid and I asked for what I

want and I didn't get it. So then we are concerned that we created this age of entitlement where young people are growing up now saying I shouldn't have to work for anything, you should just give it to me. And then it's like we created those so called monsters. But the truth is there was something good in that we led them to believe that they would have something

and that they didn't have to do. Our parents say you gotta work, and tall and you gotta And the truth is, as a successful actor and voiceover actor, I don't work hard. I work smirked. I do what I enjoy. I do what I love, and I give back to the community, and the community and the universe reward me. It's not that I have to go in and work sixty hours a week or eighty hours a week or

fourteen different jobs and be separated from my family. So this idea that it is our God given right come on to have and to be and to grow and to evolve as human beings, whatever that means and whatever that looks like to us, is where we need to be going. But but as you said, it starts with who am I and what do I want? And not being afraid to ask for what you want. Some people wanted to go to college, they couldn't do it. Some

people wanted to play basketball, they couldn't do it. Some people wanted to be professional athletes or profess rappers or professional whatever, and in many instances they were shut down. And so this other generation said, they want to be a rapper because they don't want to work, But they might want to be a rapper because they have that skill and that gift. Now here's the other thing. Here's the caveat. Not everybody can be Lebron James or Kobe Bryant.

Not everybody can be l L COO J and Beyonce and jay Z. They got that are we have created this capitalistic society that says, my neighbor was selling away and she made a bunch of money, so I'm gonna do that. Well, maybe she made a bunch of money because she was passionate about it. Just got her do that. You think I'm gonna do that too, And then when that doesn't work, you're reinforcing this idea of failure and I can't have it And it's not available to me.

But at some point you've got to be able to say, what is it that I want and what is it that I want to do, regardless of what anybody thinks. I tell people all the time, stop thinking about what other people are thinking that you are thinking about, because most of the time they are wrong, and you are wrong about what you think they think you think. It's a space of space in your mind. So if you were focused on what am I thinking about? What do

I want? And if I want to know? And I ain't gonna get to preach you on you, but if I want to know somebody's opinion of me, I'm gonna go to the Most High because his opinion or her opinion of me is all good. It's all gravy accepting of who I am and where I am right now

in this position for my greatest potential for growth. So stop thinking about what other people are thinking that you are thinking about, and start thinking about I heard this from Reverend Michael, start thinking about what God thinks of you. And there's no gap, there's no space, there's no blank anything emptiness in there. It's just you are a child of the Most High. And then we start to It works both ways, but then we start to perform with

some people would call esteemable acts. When we think we are connected to God and good, then we start doing things that are godly and good. Come on, you gotta act as if you already are. And see even when you talk about you gotta do the tap in and when we go through that, we find that through the meditation. Meditation,

we find that out through the intuition. One thing that you also said is that, um, what God isn't gonna do is tell you anything that you're not every time we have a yes and type of God, and I tell people all the time. And you know, studying improv at the ground, that's has really taught me to live at yes and kind of life because we have to walk in the expectancy of abundance. And like you said,

when you walk around with those energies, that attracts. So if you're walking in a life where you're expecting more, if you're walking in a life when you're expecting good things, if you're walking in a life knowing that you can create whatever life that you want, you find that you do because if you were created by a creator, you are meant to create absolutely, So if we're created in the image of God, we don't all look alike. So that's not the image that we were created in. We

were created in the image of creation. Come on, move things forward, to to escalate, to elevate, to raise our own consciousness and that of those around us. Because rising tide lives all boats. Whoa what you say, why did it? Exam wasn't ready for that? One tide lifts all of the boats in the harbor, everybody there. So if my consciousness is raised, then everybody around me, whether they like it or know it, or even are aware of it or not, their consciousness is being raised as well, because

sometimes they can't hold that space for themselves. So for those of us who can, we're gonna hold that space for you, and it's gonna be ready for you when you're ready to receive it. Talk about when you're ready to receive. And I find that oftentimes we are so quick to ask for what the next man have, not realizing that it was designed for them, but also forgetting whether or not we've expanded ourselves to have the capacity to hold it right right, Sometimes we're asking for things

that we aren't even ready for. What you say, and then have the audacity to get upset because we can't contain it right. But you know, the man say, if you if you stay ready, you ain't gonna get ready. If you're ready, ready, ready, then when the opportunity present itself, you're ready. So what what we need to be doing, all of us, black, white, old, young otherwise, is preparing

ourselves for who and what we really are. And it becomes so easy because and it's I'm gonna I say, I to say, I say, it becomes easy, but that doesn't mean that there aren't challenges. And one one man's prayer said, Lord, don't make it easier, just make me stronger, which because when you start working out, you can't lift a hundred pounds on the first day, you know what

I mean. But if you put in work, you lift in a hundred pounds, you lift in two hundred pounds, you're lifting your own body weight, and that does something to you psychologically to say, I remember when I couldn't get this thing up, and now I'm doing that and two times ten times what I thought I was even

capable of. But that's because you was out there putting in work, putting slaving like we need to be clear about that because the generation before us felt like the only way you're gonna get ahead is you're gonna be in the fields, or you're gonna work for for the

post office until you you know, until you did. And I watched these people work for the post office and work for the government and working these jobs that they thought were stable, and then when it came time for them to retire, they didn't have enough money to live on. So I figure, if it's gonna be tough anyway, I might as well be doing something I enjoy along the way. And I have learned that if you do what you love,

someone will love what you do. What's you saying, many of us are doing things that somebody else is doing. He did that, so you got you got plumbers who should have been doctors. You've got construction workers who should have been lawyers. But they were like, he's making money and construction, So that's an easy I'm gonna go do that right now, because and then they're miserable or they go to work in an office someplace. And I'm not diminishing the work in an office or in a retail store.

For some people, they're deriving joy from that from for some people they actually love interacting with people are working in a restaurant and doing that. But there's a host of other folks who are on those jobs and they are miserable, and you can see it when you walk in the door. And the reason that they are miserable is because they are disconnected from who and what they

really are. They were meant to do something else. They were meant to do something greater than that for them, and because they're not doing that, that's why they're angry. That's why they're hurting, that's why they're upset, that's why they're ready to take somebody else's stuff. Because King teaches me that ignorance, poverty, and disease will breed crime, no

matter what the racial group may be. So when you have people who are ignorant of themselves and who they are and are impoverished, not only financially but spiritually, then you can only to a certain degree, expect a certain level of elevation and consciousness within that community. But all of those people can come up a lot of mercy which can come up. Everybody can come everybody can come up a little bit from where you are to where you want to be to where you you are at

your next level of existence. And when you begin to practice this kind of elevation, you all of a suddenly have what we describe in metaphysics as a quantum leap. So you've been taking these baby stats. Okay, I was doing it this much, and now I can do this much. And now I got this opportunity, and now I got this opportunity, and then something else happens. It was like I did not expect that I was. I didn't expect it,

but I was ready for it. I was preparing myself for it so that I was grateful when it showed up, and I just had to stop for a minute and say thank you, thank you. Gratitude is everything. We watch people when when something quote unquote miraculous happens. But the truth is, the miraculous can be the mundane. We can turn what we thought was miraculous into our everyday existence.

The fact that don't don't get me started. The fact body functions in the way that it does, and the heart and the lungs and the pumping of blood and the skin and the hair and everything, we don't we don't have to think about any of that We don't have to work on making our heart pump blood. We don't have to work on making our lungs facilitate oxygen. We don't have to think about that. That part is

taken care. But if that is our design, and we have these designer genes that are designed to grow and evolve and expand, then we can do the same thing consciously, spiritually, and emotionally. So many of these folks, and you know, I know them and I love them, but they are atrophied. They had development to a certain level in their lives

and something happened, and emotionally they're stuck right there. Consciously, they're still in the place psychologically where they were at sixteen or thirteen or four or twenty to when trauma struck, and they weren't able to continue to to evolve in the way that they needed to. But even staying there was telling them internally, you need to deal with something that is here. You need to grow from something that

has taken place so that you can move on. This happened to you because you I hate to say it, but I'm gonna say it because you could handle it. Signed for everybody, your life was designed for you and and dare I say, by you, you put yourself in the perfect situation to evolve to your ultimate state of consciousness. Some of us had to go down to places that were low to remind ourselves that we could come up

from anywhere. Some of us had to give ourselves a head start because we knew you were low, So we had to start a little further down because we knew that's who we were and that's what we needed. So these designer genes were also designed by us for us to wait a minute, wait, I can't feel my legs. I felt that it was designed by us. And it's it truly comes to a point where you have to walk in authority over your life, you know, And it has to a lot of people now are participating in

the lip service in the talk. Everybody got the language. They got the language of therapy, they got the language of self help, they got the language of Dr Field, they got the language of Oprah, they got the language of Mary Ann Williamson. But the faith without the works is dead. You've got to do something about it. You can't just talk about it. You gotta be about it.

And and I think it's important to understand that it's not going to be easy, because if you're going after something, chances are you are flexing my souls that you have and used. Hence, that's why you're being elevated. That's why you're being given an opportunity to do more right now, right now, right now, right now, right now, Over and over and over and over again, you're giving an opportunity

to do and to be more. Right now. You can change your mind, like you can change your clothes and decide to do something differently and to do something better. And if you can't figure that out, here's my my counsel, then help somebody else, because in the act of helping, in the act of giving, you're also receiving. It's two sides of the same coin. And I'm gonna say this to folks, got to learn how to forgive and buy.

Forgive I mean to give forward. I mean to give people something that you don't thing they have earned or deserved. That's what forgiveness really is. Because when you're waiting on them to apologize and to earn it and to show you that they are remorseful about it before you can forgive them, that's not forgiveness. That's a negotiation. That's a business transaction. That's not forgiveness. Forgiveness it's not for them,

it's for you or forgiving them. So you are giving yourself permission to go forward because otherwise, withholding love and withholding what is really for them is only keeping you back in the space whether and I tell folks all the time, not forgiving someone is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. And it's like the thing of when you're talking about giving anyhow and how you can't help to receive because when you give, your

hands have to be open. Well, that's cycling in for something else to come into it. But it goes back to what we're initially saying that that whole mindset, if you're come from fear, you're coming from lack. You feel

as though you're trying to constantly fill up something. But like when you said, when you come from a yes and type of lifestyle and knowing that God is creating to be more, to do things exceedingly and abundantly, you realize you're just on overflow with your thought, with your possibilities, with your dreams ever more and nevertheless, never more, neverthless. It King teaches me that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes with the consistent

work and the tireless effort of dedicated individuals. And without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. So he ultimately says, the time to do right is now, and that time is always right to do right, oh always. And the first person that most of us have to forgive is ourselves,

because we're withholding love from ourselves. We've decided that we made a mistake and we did something, and therefore we don't deserve the blessings and the opportunities that are coming to us. Now we won't say that and admit that out loud, but we know that there was something that we did, and as a result we think, well, I could never come up because I got this thing that I did. And so the first thing you have to do is forgive yourself. And that's not to pretend like

you didn't do it, because you did. But you are entitled to forgiveness. You are entitled to give forward to yourself. It's like throwing a pass to yourself that you later on in life can step up and receive the path that you threw the things that you said in motion, the things that the seeds that you planted. Because many of us, and I've said this before, we will plant these sea leads and then we'll walk away from them,

thinking nothing came of that. And then we have these brilliant ideas and we start on them and we walk away, and then somebody else comes along and go, that's a great idea, and then later we're going, that was my idea. I thought about that, but you left you you were impatient. The folks say ten thousand hours, Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan's, Michael Jackson, Tiger Woods, uh Born Buffett, they put in ten thousand hours doing something that they really wanted to

do and it paid off. And we think ten thousand hours, Man, that's a long time. I was trying to calculate how long that is in general, so this time, but you know what, the kids are spending ten thousand hours on the Facebook, thousand hours on the cell phone. I mean, if you think about it, we checked that cell phone several times an hour, sometimes several times a minute. The phone didn't ring, it didn't ring. There's nothing going on

to see the light, Oh, okay, okay, I'm breathing. Okay, okay, okay, and then we put it down. If we just did that with ourselves, Oh my gosh, let me check in with me. How am I doing, What am I feeling? What am I thinking? What am I doing? Towards even a second at a time, five seconds at a time. I'm not gonna pick up the phone right now. I'm

gonna spend some time thinking about me. I'm gonna think about what it is that I want and what it is that's gonna move me from where I am to where I want to be if I just take one step at a time, and so much of it, and it sounds tripe, but it's not. But so much of

it begins with a state of mind. It all begins with a fellow's will, with a state of mind, and that we can change well, I mean, the fact that we can think about what we think about and to decide what we're going to think about tells us that the mind is not in control. The mind is here to function and serve some higher power. So consciousness infuses the mind, not the other way around. The mind thinks

about consciousness. The consciousness is It just is, and it always is, and it always was and it always will be. It reminds us that we're connected to everything. I'm sorry, what were we supposed to be talking about. Here's the thing that's so interesting. You know. I got you on here because I want to talk about the importance of

having a dream. But everything that you said, whether it becomes a fact of norm what you deserve, how important it is to make sure that you tap into the dream, How understanding how you have to be connected, how you have to realize that you have the possibility and the power to enable yourself to create the life that you want, which can come tangible as your dream. And I think

sometimes that people forget that. They just want to go after the idea of what a dream is, but it really comes down to understanding what it means to really have one. And I'm just listening to you and how you're talking and just the ways of how you've allowed your mindset to fuel you as to where you're going,

but more importantly, to understand who you are. So then when I challenge or I asked you to think, you know, we talked about you know, starting off with like everything that's happened in the world today, that kind of stems like the makeup of who we are and what one is. You know, this episode is coming out on Martin Luther King Day, and here this man has been talking about a dream. Has much changed since he delivered the speech. The answer to that is both yes and to know,

there are some things that have changed. We have evolved as a species and as a people, and as a country and as a nation. Martin Luther King, for example, said we will have a black president. He said that in the nineteen sixties when people said, Negro you crazy, There's no way that these white folks will ever elect a black man to be the president of the United States. But here we go. He wasn't listening to what they

were talking about. He just tapped into something someplace else and he was like, I think it should only take about twenty five years. It took fifty. It took fifty years. But he held space for it until it happened. And it's interesting because yes, there are some things that have changed. And black people are making more money right now, some black people than ever before. We have more rich people right now than we have ever had, not just black people,

but on the planet. We have more millionaires than have ever existed on the planet at any time in human history.

We have more of them now. Now there might be fewer blacks that have as much money as they once did when it was close, But in terms of the sheer numbers of people who are making a million dollars or more or have a million dollars or more, there's a whole lot of now here is here in life the rub and here and going back to King, and I'm not condemning these athletes for making long paper because somebody was making money off of them and then they

signed a million dollar contract to play basketball or to play football. But when we have some people making a hundred million dollars for a few years and we have millions of people sleeping on the street, King would say something is out of kilter. There is something wrong with that. No, it's not to say that those brothers shouldn't be making

money or that other people shouldn't be making money. But if we have that kind of money to pay one person send a hundred million dollars, then we should not have people sleeping on the street anywhere in this country. King would say, we're all interconnected, and as long as there is are poor people in the world. Nobody can be rich even if he has a million dollars, because

we're all connected. As long as diseases are rampant, and we now know that they are, no man can be totally healthy, even if you just got to check up in the finest clinics of the nation. Strangely enough, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you are to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way the world is made. It's called the interrelated structure of reality, and

it just is the way that it is now. There's some other things that King talked about, even in the I have a dream speech that people like to forget or like bury someplace. But he said a couple of things. He said, the people ask they ask in of the devotees of civil rights. The people are devoted to changing the system that we live in. Well, damn man, when will you be satisfied? He's like, when when is it

ever enough? And he says, and I quote, we can never be satisfied as long as the negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality, has that changed? He says, we can never be satisfied as long as the negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. Has that changed? And then he says, we can never be satisfied as long as there's a negro in Mississippi who cannot vote, or a negro in New York who believes he has nothing for which to vote. Ultimately,

he says, we can never be satisfied until justice. Justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream. Those are the words that people forget in that speech. They hear him talking about it. I have a dream and all the hands together, and you know, all some of that has happened. But that other stuff he said. They said, when will you be satisfied? He said, we will never be satisfied until these things take place. And those things, in many instances, have not taken place. They

have not. So, yes, we recognize the progress that we have made, and we acknowledge the work that there is still left to do. And in many ways, thank you that we have something to do. Thank you that we have something noble to do. Because what he talks about the thing is about this, I have a dream speech

that most people don't know. When he delivered that speech in Washington, d c. At the Lincoln Memorial on August in nineteen sixty three at about four thirty four twenty in the afternoon, people think that's the first time that he ever talked about having a dream. It's not. So he went to Chicago, he went to Detroit and he talked about this dream, and he went someplace else and talked about what he called the American Dream. You listen to the speech, he says, I have a dream that

is deeply rooted in the American dream. And what he says to America is just be true to what you said on paper. He's like, you wrote it down. It's like some of the greatest words, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are some of the greatest words and flowery language ever written in the history of the world. He's like, just be true to what you said on paper. Because what you said on papers that all men were created equal and that they were endowed by their creator

with certain inalienable rights. And here we go. We love to alienate people and make aliens and make them illegal aliens, and make them like they come from another planet. He says they are in alienable rights, which means you can't make them alien or deprive them from anybody. That's what they wrote, That's what the Founding fathers wrote, and that all men are creating equal and that they are endowed by their creator with certain and alienable rights. And among

these here we go our life. I'm gonna say that one again. Among them are life, liberty, which represents our freedom, and three and I think maybe the most important one the pursuit of happiness. So, like, what would you say to those people out there that are doing the work, you know, to for this pursue life of with life, with liberty and happiness and freedom and all that, Like you know, all of the politicians, the activists, you know, even like everyday people like you and me. You know,

what would you say to them? And what do you think King would say to them? For the ones that are living it, we would say thank you, and we would say the work is not complete until everybody's taking care of But you know, everybody don't want to do the work. And so you know, I was on the fence, you know, you were saying, like, as long as there's homeless people out there, you know, um, then kind of guess sort of things wouldn't be right if someone else

is making a hundred plus million dollars. But the fact of the matter is everybody is not going to be willing to do the work. And I don't know myself if I feel that everybody deserves to just have studings handed. Now we're talking about the different discrepancies, whether it be mental disorders or different pre existing conditions that may and to fear with that, that's different. But just to say, okay, everybody, come on up and jump on the bandwagon. You didn't

put in the word you know what. We can say that. But when we think about this, let's just talk about the houselessness crisis that is existing and rampant right now across this country. You can go to any major metropolitan city in the United States of America, and you can even go to some small podunk towns that aren't even on the map, and you find not just poor people,

but homeless people who are begging for money. Now they some of them, we want to say they're lazy, they don't want to work, but they are comprised of several different groups. One, you still have people who have been in war as far back as visaible mental disorders. Absolutely too. You have other people who have been abused and have

other issues mentally, psychologically and otherwise. You have these people who went to war who thought that they come back and be normal, but they're not because that is not our nature, that is not our condition. Now the other people you have on the street. Now you have people who have drug addiction. Now, when it was cracked, it was it was a criminal problem. Now that it's heroin

and meth it's a health condition. But you have a lot of people who we never thought about would be out on the street that are addicted to a chemical substance that is a health condition that they cannot control.

And then you have people out there who two more groups. One, you have a bunch of folks who could not be accepted by their family, whether they came out to them or they decided to do something that their families disagreed with, and they wanted to be who they really were, and they weren't given the opportunity to so they were either

put out or they left. And then last, you have people who once owned home and who were once normal and who once had jobs and they had an illness of cancer or heart disease or diabetes or liver failure, or they've lost a spouse and they'd spent everything they had trying to care for a child or a loved one or appearing and they lost their home. So it's not just the folks that are out there that that we're saying they don't They just don't want to do

anything and they don't want to be up there. They make up the smallest segment of these four calf five categories that people wind up on the streets in something happened, and somebody's got to care about those people. And somebody's got to care about those people. And because it's easy to say they just don't want to do anything, but that's the label that they tried to put on us. They try to call us lazy when we were working as slaves twelve hours a day from sun up to

sun down, and now we're lazy. No, we're not lazy. We just don't want to work for free, or you know, perhaps saying that you know, our language is improper when you've stolen everything away from us. So we had to to conjure up what we could muster. I'm sorry, but that's the BS because we will allow Milannia Trump who

never mastered the English language. And now if you go to a restaurant at the drive through, those are people that have come here from Mexico and other places, and often that accident is so thick you can hardly understand what they're saying. So we can't use that anymore. We can't say that the people can't talk because you got folks here from all over the world that haven't mastered the English language, and we've worked so hard to master the English language and sound like the master that in

some ways we've lost our culture and our our identity. Well, yeah, that's what I mean. I think a lot of that was stripped away even coming over here. You know, the

tongue was stripped away, the language of communication. So even as you're saying, like the disparities that when it comes to people of color, people who are natively from this land, especially black people, what we kind of had to make shift and put pieces together that I I didn't necessarily fit, you know, and you know when we look at this whole, you know, this bigger scope of the disparities when it comes down to people and everything that Dr King had to say, what would you say is a food for

thought that you want people to walk away with. Number One, you have to take care of yourself. What does that look like? And what does that mean? You can't take care of somebody else. You can't help somebody else until

you're taking care of you. Now, whatever that means for you, whether that involves meditation, whether that involves eating right, diet, exercise, um, reading, uh, talking to people who are uplifting, listening to shows like yours where they're talking about something that's on the positive. Look at that. Hey, hey, come on now, you gotta putting that plague on the Vitamin D podcast, and you better shine some light on your life how we're talking about. Send me Sevy, I'm seve In on your life. I

stopped worrying about what everybody else is thinking. All these people that wound up doing something, there was a time when nobody believed that they could or they would. Go all the way back to Thomas Edison and Copernicus. People thought they were crazy, but they were focused and they were driven, and they accomplished something that we still celebrate today. Martin Luther King. They talked about him bad Black folks too. He gave one speech where he said, you know, I'm tired.

It's exhausting. Yeah, how can I go on? When when even negroes don't really believe in me? How can I? How? And I get up every morning and do this. I'm tired and I'm I'm exhausted, and I can't go on. And then he says, and then I went back into prayer meditation, and I heard somebody say, Martin Luther King, stand up for justice, righteousness, stand up love, stand up and low I will be with you even until the

end of the world. He's like he heard all these songs and all these things, and he kept coming back sitting by himself. He would have to go in the kitchen and then warm up a cup of coffee at one o'clock in the morning and listen to himself, listen to his higher self. And so so often we're listening to our lower vibrational self, the lowest common denominator, which is anger and baseness and rivalry. The higher elevation thought

and consciousness is aware that we are all connected. And sometimes when somebody else does something, it really does don't have anything to do it with me. They're doing it because they're hurting so I can stop hurting. A friend of mine wrote a song that said, I love myself so much that I can love you so much that you can love you so much that you can start loving me. M m h. I gotta start there. I love myself so much that I can love you so much, so you can start loving you so much so you

can start loving me. Isn't that Wow? That's the power of attraction. Yeah. And I'll say this this last thing about King. He was not a perfect man, so we place him on this pedestal and think, well, he did all of these great things. You don't have to be great to do something great. You don't have to do everything, but you have to do something. You don't have to be charismatic, but you have to care. And lastly, you don't even have to be brave. You just have to

be willing bars complete. Did you receive it? I hope you caught it. Grab your no, but grab your pencil. Heck, they ought oppressed record to get that. Wow. Well, Mr Gerald c Rivers, I wanted to talk more about or and additionally about your voiceover career, about your dreams and what you do with the drama. For whatever reason, and this right now, this is what we needed. Yeah, we we do all of that, but all of that is

part of the dream. Working with kids, the voiceover career, and cartoons and video games, all things that that I could not have imagined for myself. And when you think about it too, of just talking about you know, what m okay day means and what it means to have a dream, and just even and listening to those principles as were helped you get to where you are today,

helped me get to where I am today. Heck, Ger, you remember when you first met me ows up there pleading well to work for a voiceover session, And I thank you. I thank you for just walking in your gifts, of loving your gifts so much that it had room to overflowing me because the countless conversations, the countless times

that you said, don come over here and record. I appreciate you for speaking life on times that I wanted to give up and you said, don just hold on because just like King, fifty years had to pass before there was a black president. But you just gotta hold on. You got to hold the space for one another. Come on,

we're holding the space for ourselves. But if you can't hold it for you, hold it for your kids, holding for your wife, holding for your mom and them, hold space for somebody else to be better today than they worry yesterday and believe that that's possible if you have to start with somebody else. Start with somebody else. But all of that stuff that ain't nothing. That's our job, that's what we're supposed to do. That's who we are, that's how we be, that's how we continue to grow

and evolve. And then it's an each one teach one somewhere down the line. Uh, you keep getting me off on these tanents. But our problem is we think if I do something for you, you gotta do something for me, and it doesn't work that way. I just do something for you because that's what I'm supposed to do. The universe takes care of me somewhere else down the line.

So all that stuff you talked about voiceover career movies and video games and cartoons and animated films and campaigns and selling products and you know next on NBC, all of that stuff that came about because I was available and of service every opportunity that I could. I wasn't so selfish to think I can't help you right now,

because I gotta by my own thing right now. I gotta do my own thing, that is my own thing, that is my own thing being serviced to you and to somebody else who's at a different place than where I am, and the universe says, I got you, Thank you, good job. Now. I don't do that with the expectation. I do that because that's what I'm supposed to do, and then the rest of it takes care of itself.

That's what it reminds me of the dream, because even with King, with his dream, it wasn't just solely about him. It was about everybody. And like how you said, everybody can eat off of it. There's enough food, there's enough clothes, there's enough jobs, there's enough cars, there's enough homes, there's enough dreams, and there's enough hope to take care of the world. Over and again, some things are a little

out of balance, are a little out of kilter. And the reason and I've been doing these Martin Luther King's features for thirty plus years, and I never thought that I would still be doing that, But here I am still doing it as long as people want to hear it, and people want to hear because it's the truth. I have a model that just says I keep doing it and if I have to do it for millions of people for one person to get it, then I'll keep

doing it until that one person gets it. And I say to audiences all the time, let that one person be you. Let that one person because we're waiting on what they call the watershed moment. There's people all over the planet. There's more conscious people right now than they've ever been in human history, and at some point we

just need one more to represent the majority. And it's gonna be a tipping point where all of a sudden, there are more await people on the planet than there are people who are walking around as zombies and asleep. And the moment that happens, I think that's where the

quantum leap takes place for humanity. So those of us who are conscious and who are awake, we're just walking around shaking people saying wake up, come on, it's okay, wake up, wake up because right now you're you're in a dream that's turned into a nightmare and you're scared. But wake up dream while you're awake. That's right, Lucid dream have waking dreams and decide what you're gonna dream about.

Wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up. Oh my gosh, Gerald Rivers, we're talking about dreams, but essentially we're calling everybody to wake up. And you know what, Geral. Before you get out of here, I want you to share a little bit of King's speech, but not the traditional I have a Dream speech. I understand that you have another message for us, and it's from his uh. One of his speech is called the Dilemma and the Challenge.

The Dilemma and the Challenge, bearing that I have dozens of these speeches committed to memory, but you're is just a short excerpt that will give some people something to think about outside of Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech. Take it away. The Dilemma and the Challenge facing the Negro today. You will remember that it was in the year of sixteen nineteen when the first Negro

slaves landed on the shores of this great nation. They were brought here from the souls of Africa, and the Negro lived me this system of slaverty for two hundred and forty four years. For all of these years, he was a friend to be used and not a person to be respected. And even after Slavor ended, the Negro realized eyes that he was confronting a new type of slavery, because racial segregation is nothing but slavery covered up with

certain niceties of complexity. And in spite of the fact that we have lived with physical slavery two hundred and forty four years, in spite of the fact that we have lived with segregated conditions for almost one hundred years, the demands of history require that we be as productive, as resourceful, and as responsible as the people who never

had these disadvantages. Here we are, as a people having its perienced political domination, economic exploitation, segregation, and humiliation for well now three hundred and forty four years, and yet the demands of history require that we be as productive, as resourceful, and as responsible as the people who never had these disadvantages. This is our dilemma. He who gets behind in a race must forever remain behind or run faster than the man in front. This is our dilemma.

But this dilemma is at one and the same time a great challenge. We are challenged to mobilize our resources. We are challenged to mobilize all the constructive forces that we can muster to make a creative contribution in the life of our nation and of this world. And I would like to suggest this afternoon some of the things that we must do to grapple with this dilemma and meet the challenge of our First of all, we must develop and maintain a sense of dignity and in self respect.

We must not allow anybody or any force to make us feel that we do not count. We must believe in our souls that we are worth food, that we are somebody, that we are significant, And we must walk the streets every day with this sense of dignity, in this sense of somebodyness. Wow, oh wow, that was amazing. I was if you're talking, I didn't even realize I was.

I was still on mute. Gerald WHOA the dilemma and the challenge, And I think it I think it speaks to that Georgia's situation that all of a sudden, there were things they said we couldn't do, and now we don't. Flipped Georgia, and in turn, we flipped the Senate, and Stacy Abrams did it with dignity and self respect, and we accomplished that by recognizing our power, remembering who we are. You're here, here, here, all those who are near and far here the message, Oh dear, oh wow, thank you

so much. All good in the neighborhood. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope you feel inspired. I hope that you walked away knowing that you are more because you deserve more, because you already are what you are. And um, if you love this and you want to find out more from Gerald, you want to follow him on social media at Gerald see Rivers on Twitter and Instagram, and on Facebook it's Gerald dot C dot rivers um.

And this is a man with a plan. You can catch him for voiceover work, book him as a master drummer, or you can just follow him and get inspired. Just as we've deale with this conversation, and um, you know we're back every Monday with more inspiring conversations and insights. And get this if you need even more Vitamin D in your life outside of this podcast, I want to make sure you follow me on social media. It's at Dawn day Speaks on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter wherever

however you know where to find me. And so until next time, I want you to always remember you are your greatest assin.