Last week, I was surprised by the number of students who asked me why we had today off. They wanted to know what he did that was such a big deal to be the only person, short of Jesus, to have a school-day holiday to himself. Thankfully, I had asked that question often enough of myself to have an answer. It's not so much who Martin Luther King Jr. was, or even what he did, that we pay tribute to; it's his methods and the eventual success of those methods. In a time when so many voices were calling for violence and revolution, Dr. King organized peaceful (on his side) protests of civil disobedience as a way to show how so many laws were racist and wrong. Like Ghandi's movement to free India from British rule, Dr. King's strategy ultimate brought about an end to direct racism in the law.
We continue to celebrate his efforts partially because we are not through the fog of racism yet. Hopefully, we took time on this day of remembrance to realize that if one group of people can be marginalized, then all of us can be. Hopefully we thought about need to stand together to protect the rights of all of those who live in this grand land of ours.
... and then we played our video games.