Rant #3,053: I Remember the Feeling

Today, it’s Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day, celebrating the slain civil rights activist’s birthday, which was actually yesterday.

If he would still be alive, he would have been 94 years of age on January 15.

Even though the day is a federal holiday--which pretty much means that many businesses are closed, schools are closed, government offices are closed and there is no mail delivery—I, personally, never had the day off.

When I was substitute teaching in the 1980s—looking for that regular position that never came—the holiday was not yet a federal one, and school districts could be opened or closed, respectively.

I worked in many districts that were open today, so I worked on this day, as many teachers took the day off even if their schools were open.

And in whatever later jobs I had, we never had this day off—whether it was a federal holiday or not--so I worked on this day, including during my final full time job of nearly 24 years.

Since today is supposedly a day of service, I figured that my day of service was to go to work and work, and that would suffice as “service.”

And here, now in my current position as a remote worker, I will continue that trend, as I will work today.

I will send in a story that I did over the weekend, so even if no one is around to put the story up on the Internet, that is how I will continue to work on MLK Day.

And a lot of my day of service will admittedly be watching TV, as the New York Knicks will be playing their traditional MLK Day game later this afternoon, so I will do my “service” watching the game.

I am not trying to minimize the day, the importance of the day, and the man that we are celebrating this day.

Dr. King had a tremendous impact on our nation and on our culture, and certainly, growing up where I did in South Jamaica, Queens, we knew his impact almost personally, whether we were black or white.

But for me, over the years, this is what the day has become, another holiday on the calendar.

Sorry to be so blasé about the day, but that is the way I feel about it.

I can connect to the day, perhaps better than I can, let’s say, to days honoring Presidents Washington and Lincoln, because I was alive when Dr. King was around and in the news almost every day.

But beyond that, it pretty much stops there.

And again, this does not minimize his importance on our country and our culture, both of which were immense.

But perhaps I connect the dots too much, and I remember when he was senselessly shot and killed, and I remember what went on in my community at the time, the mixed-race Rochdale Village, which was the largest cooperative housing development in the world at the time.

The aftermath of his murder was terrible.

Many of us school kids were threatened by those who simply believed that since a white person killed King, that all white people were responsible for his death.

I remember the Black Panthers demanding that the school I went to at the time, the almost new P.S. 30, be named after Dr. King, and if not, they were going to blow up the school (it wasn’t, and they never did).

I remember the fear that a lot of us had when walking the grounds of the development, which was smack dab in the middle of the one of the longest standing and proudest black neighborhoods in America.

And yes, I remember the rage that some people had, which might have been kept up bottled inside before his death, but with his passing, exploded out of them.

During the aftermath of this tragedy, I was afraid for perhaps the first time in my life, and it forced me to grow up a bit and not be a kid anymore.

Look, I know that that is not fair to characterize Dr. King by those horrid remembrances, but I was just about 11 years old in 1968 when he was shot and killed, so that is what I remember.

I remember that when we heard the news reports of his murder, my mother yelled, “Oh God” over and over … and she ended up being spot on, as life was never the same in Rochdale Village after this tragedy.

Dr. King was a great man,, a man who brought to our eyes and ears and brains that if “all men are created equal,” then those cannot be empty words, they need to be real ones and must be carried out to the letter.

He fought for that in every march and speech he attended and made, and finally, when people of all backgrounds were starting to listen, he was so needlessly gunned down.

And when he was gunned down, I know that our lives changed, and my life changed too.

I was just about 11 years old—he died on April 4 and my birthday was on April 28—and I might have morphed from a kid into a man that sorry day, as I had to face challenges that I never even thought possible prior to his death.

Life would never, ever be the same again for me, and I wonder how many of you also felt the same thing—the move from childhood to adulthood—due to the circumstances of his unfortunate passing.

So yes, we celebrate the man and his mission today, but I will always think about that fateful day in April on every MLK Day … even though today we celebrate his birthday … but to me at least, the day of his birth and the day of his death are so intertwined that I have to think about both during this day.

Maybe that is a fault of my own thinking, but I do believe that we all grew up a little bit when MLK left us, and later that year, we grew up another notch when Robert Kennedy left us, too.

The year 1968 made all of us grow up a little bit, I think, whether we were 10-years-old-going-on 11 or we were in our 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, or even older than that.

So again, have a great Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day … but at least for me, those thoughts I just described to you will be in my mind today, even though I would prefer that they weren’t in my thought processes at all.