• Question: ok so i've kind of been considering and rewording this question for the past few days, but here it is. it's a little similar to the last one but with a bit of a twist:
    you have been given the chance to go back in history to ANY point, and whisper a single phrase to any historical figure. any bit of information you choose.
    ok here are the rules:
    -it cannot be a direct command
    -this person will take you deadly seriously
    -there will be no weird random butterfly effect stuff (like, if you tell napoleon "russian winters are HELLA cold" and he doesn't invade, it doesn't mean that somehow your great great grandfather will be chucked out of existence and therefore you will cease to exist. unless your great great grandpa was somehow DIRECTLY involved...)

    if any of the rules are too restrictive/prevent you from some fantastic answer that popped into your head, by all means drop one.
    happy answering!!! - charbar
  • Answer:

    Excellent question, by the way, I’ve been thinking about how to answer it for the past few weeks and every time I would get close to an answer my brain would explode with the limitless possibilities; would I want to tell my past self something? (Yes, of course, hundreds of things.) Is there some historical figure that I could really affect with a well-chosen phrase? Would the effects be too great? Too insignificant?

    There’s a lot of history to contend with while considering this question. It’s funny, because my head is always swimming with random historical facts (Especially this semester - 9 credits of history, 3 credits of art history? I barely have a chance.) and cause and effect is a big part of how I see history fit together. I wanted to talk to someone who could benefit from one single phrase, who would be able to make a major change from that, so I picked Martin Luther King, Jr.

    I would go back in time to just before he was assassinated and say to him, “Your legacy is not complete; right now your security means more to America than you think.” 

    Hopefully, in taking me deadly seriously, he would take more precautions for his own safety, thwarting the Memphis assassination attempt. Then, he would be able to continue his vocal work protesting the Vietnam War, and he would continue to work for equality of civil rights in America. 

    I say this because I don’t think his work was complete, and we would have benefited from his later work. I hate that we’ve taken his legacy and denatured it into something so broad that organizations like the tea party can appropriate his image for their own uses. If MLK Jr. had lived and become more radical, he would have alienated a large number of people, yes, but his early work would still be undeniably influential, and his later work would protect his earlier work from being subverted into something entirely different than he intended. 

    So there you have it; I would keep MLK Jr. alive - and radical.