My MLK day

I'm often asked what my favorite holiday is. I often struggle with that question, but I usually decide that my favorite holiday is Martin Luther King, Jr. day. Well, not really. In fact, I don't think I've ever said that, but I made that decision this MLK day. I decided that for a few reasons. First of all, Martin Luther King, Jr. is almost certainly my favorite historical figure ever. I don't know how many thousand times I've seen his "I Have a Dream" speech, but I still get huge chills every time I see it. I really know very few African American people, unfortunately (a common nickname for my city is Lake No Negro), but of course I support full rights for them. I remember in preschool, untainted by society, I wondered why people were racist, since you can't choose your skin color. How can a 6 year-old understand that, but not a 60 year-old? But I think that King was about more than just Black rights. He had a dream that one day, black people and white people, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics could join hands and say, "Free at last!" He was unique in that he harbored no hard feelings against white people in general (when I was 6, I was basically wondering what the fuck white people were smoking, and that we were absolute assholes, which was kind of ironic since we were all white). That is the spirit of his I have a dream speech. The other thing is that he didn't expect special treatment. One line in his famous speech even mentions his dream of going to jail together with white people. My favorite line in the speech that I think sums up the whole thing is, "I have a dream that one day my four little children will be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." (I got the chills a little just typing that). What better way to sum it up.

So anyway, Martin Luther King day (since 2000, a holiday in all 50 states... Thanks Utah!) has now become a national day of service. The president left his whole president gig to paint apples on the wall of a school cafeteria, for example. As for me, my Jew leadership group had our annual MLK day "retreat." We started off the day by going to the Children's Book Bank, which is a truly wonderful organization that takes donated children's books and distributes them to low income kids. In low-income areas, there is an average of one book per 300 children. That is absolutely horrifying. And not having books in early childhood years is hugely detrimental to their academic success, their imaginations, and even the bonds they form with their parents. So anyway, we all left our schoolwork and essays to come clean kids' books. By pure coincidence, we were lucky enough to choose the same location to volunteer at as our wonderful governor of a week, John Kitzhaber, who took over my summer. So, I can say that I worked with the governor. I assumed he was just going to stop by, see what we were doing, talk to the organization and be on his way, but what ended up happening is that he walked in with his girlfriend, and they sat down and started to clean books just like we were. It was really powerful to work in a small room with a few very young kids, my Jew group, some adults, and the most important person in the state all working together to do the same thing to help the community. We also had the added bonus of being able to talk to the Governor, tell him about our group, and ask him what sort of activities our group would be able to do and pursue to be able to help Portland and Oregon the most. What he said was that what we were doing at the book bank was hugely important, and the other huge issue is hunger. Oregon has one of, if not the highest hunger rates in the country. We have wonderful land and great farms, but somehow people aren't getting food, and it's really unfortunate. So, the governor left, and we did too a short while later, but we were able to take back a wealth of ideas for the remainder of our day. So we went back to the Jewish museum to finish our day. We did various things that are of little interest to the reader, but one thing that I want to mention is that the main thing our group does is that we form smaller groups to actually do things in the community. So we formed those groups today. My group's main issue was hunger, which the Gov told us was important, but we decided to bring basically every single other issue into it too, including education, which Dr. K said was important too. So, what we're doing is creating community gardens around the community, starting at lower income schools. We were also thinking about creating them at homeless shelters and subsidized housing complexes, so that people would be able to eat (and eat healthy) regardless of their social status, race, religion, or background. I would like to think that it's somewhat of a continuation of King's dream, and that is the ultimate important thing.