DREAMS CAN COME TRUE

When I was a youngster, I used to get 2 months off from school every summer. My Dad would get the usual 2 week vacation. Every summer we would go stateside. The favourite place was Cape May, New Jersey. Sometimes Rye Beach, New Hampshire and one time Virginia Beach, but usually Cape May. We would stay in a campground and go to the beach daily.

One summer our neighbours at the campground, who had the same last name as ours, became kind of buddy like. They had a daughter my age, about 12, and her father was a policeman from Philadelphia. I would hang about with the daughter and our folks would play cards together.

One day we were having a barbeque together. One of the campers near us was a black family and the head of that family was a Doctor. This policeman said something disparaging about this black man and I got really upset with him. I laced into him about how this man was just as good a citizen as he was; this man was a Doctor who looked out for his fellow man just like you as a Policeman were supposed to do. You weren't supposed to say bad things about people that you didn't even know. That I now had more respect for this Doctor than I did for him. The Policeman was kind of taken aback, and my parents were very quiet. We weren't so buddy buddy after that.

Later, they confided in me that they were very proud of what I had said.

Now I have all kinds of respect for the professional policeman. I have always thought of them as there to help me in times of trouble. I still feel that way. I believe that there motto is "To serve and protect" and I think they mostly do a good job of that. This man just kind of rattled my cage.

We still have a long way to go to realize the dream that Dr. Martin Luther King had. There is inequality all over the place. It is still prevalent in the minds of many people that blacks are inferior, that women are inferior, that latinos are inferior. When will we come to realize that different is not inferior. That different is merely different. There are always two sides to every story and now you have one of mine.

Happy Birthday Dr. King!