"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere" Martin Luther King Jr. said, and his words are stunningly apt. His words do not mean that every violation of human rights represents an immediate existential threat to everyone else. Each small country in the world that violates human rights is a not set to take over the world. But King's words have a richer meaning than that.

It is not just the injustice itself that threatens us, but far more important is the refusal to see it, the refusal to look, to identify what is happening, in short to be willfully blind. King maintained that whites were damaging, not only blacks, but also themselves by refusing to recognize the injustice of Jim Crow.

Everyday we constantly are called on to make choices, to assess situations and to make judgments. The quality of our focus, our honesty with ourselves about what is happening, these are crucial to our success or failure. We must choose the right friends, the right job, the right mate, and time and time again we must judge what is good for us and what is bad for us.