On Monday, my wife, daughter, and I went to participate in a Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. celebration at First Churches of Northampton, MA. As you may know, our city and this church specifically is known for being one of the most progressive and liberal communities in the country. Last year, we attended an amazing Thanksgiving Day celebration at this church that really emphasized the significance of the occasion from the point of view of the Native Americans who were here before us. Therefore, I guess you can say that we had high expectations for this one.

Unfortunately, we were rather disappointed at the MLK Day event that they organized. First, they had an open “plenary” session where members of a regional organization, Victory Over Violence, spoke and showed a video entitled “Quest for Peace” to the audience. The problem was that there were scores of young children in the audience and that this video showed several scenes of graphic violence. Even though the program mentioned that this would be the case, almost everyone we spoke to thought that the video was much too graphic for young children and was not an appropriate choice.

After that, the opening plenary broke up and audience members chose different smaller events to attend, We decided to go to a storytelling event. The two stories were good ones, one about a boy who wants to squish an ant with his shoe and the other was one called “Don’t Laugh at Me” that is a poem/song about respecting differences. However, the problem with both these stories was that neither specifically dealt with race, which was rather ironic since this was supposed to be an event to honor Dr. Rev. King. So although the storytellers did a nice job with the stories, again many of us were left disappointed.

On the bright side, attendance at these events was huge and at the least, it reinforced for us that we are indeed very fortunate to live in this community.