The Dream Marchers

I didn’t join the marchers in Los Angeles earlier this week and neither did any of my children. Well, they’re not children – they are, now, adults.

When I asked the eldest if she’d followed the “happenings” on TV that day, she nonchalantly asked what was I talking about.

“The commemoration,” I responded in some sort of disbelief.

She then wanted to know what commemoration.

Patiently, as we’re required to handle things as parents, I answered matter-of-factly, The March on Washington – King’s “I Have A Dream”speech.”

“Oh, that,” she said with a distinct tone of annoyance.

Not much different than the gentleman at our monthly discussion group who said he hated the speech and was pretty much tired of all the media focus on That Speech when King had made so many other ones.

These marches, many people say, draw the necessary attention to the social injustices of our time. If people don’t demonstrate, which is often the question, how will their concerns be heard?

I can hear the wheels of the grocery shopping carts that the homeless, everywhere, are guiding through the streets.

I hear social injustice as the homeless make a lot of rattling noise with the recyclable bottles and cans they are picking out of trash cans and dumpsters.

The social injustice of our time can be seen in real time human form sleeping under bridges, on park benches, in alleys and on the street.

These throw-away people are too weak to march. They’re too disoriented to carry a placard. And those who were remembering 1963, when King performed in Washington DC on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, most likely would not be wanting to have the unbathed, unshaven and matted-hair homeless next to them.

Nary a current marcher who I heard interviewed by reporters, spoke of America’s real shame.

Hey, but then, I wasn’t too different to my offspring; I forgot to turn on the television to catch the show, so since I missed the opening act I can’t complain, can I?

So what’s the matter with my household and the guy at the discussion group? Well, he later said he was pretty much disillusioned and knew darn well this country wasn’t much about taking care of the have-nots no matter what color they were.

My eldest said she was busy preparing for the first week of classes at the local community college and really didn’t have the interest or time to get worked up about “this stuff.”

But don’t we realize what King stood for? Don’t we understand the struggle for social justice?

We must be blind to the hands on the clock turning back. We must be forgetting to ponder the questions as to whether black folk are better off now than they were in 1963 when King said, “one day. . . “

Maybe members of my household realize their life didn’t change when Obama became President or when Oprah Winfrey was denied entrance to the high-end specialty store.

The Dream?