Peace and Unity in Long Beach

Martin Luther King Jr Day Celebration

Long Beach, California celebrated it's 20th annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day Peace and Unity Celebration early on Saturday January 19th, 2008. This article is not about the festival although it was fun and I got to see the Delfonics, Crush and L.T.D. perform live as an added bonus for attending this years festival and parade. The after parade celebration is aptly held at MLK Jr park in Long Beach's 6th District. City Councilman of the 6th District, Dee Andrews also aptly choose Dr. King's book "Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?" as this year's theme. It has been forty years this year since Dr. King was slain and I agree with Councilman Andrews, that it seems we are still fighting the same issues today that we were battling then: poverty, racism and militarism.

Then it was the youth that fought to end the Viet Nam war. Today many are protesting for an end to the Iraq war, even as our Senate passed an Iran Resolution which is the first green-light to invade Iran. The Long Beach Peace and Unity celebration was a day of harmony except for a small confrontation between a vendor and an irate mother. The mother misunderstood what the vendor was telling the boy that she was going to give him a free soda or bottled water if he did not have money to buy one. Other than that it was all peace signs and love. Several groups were passing out Stop The War notices of a massive Peace Rally being planned for March 15, 2008 the 5 year anniversary of the Iraq invasion. Those things tie in with the quotes I had chosen as my Martin Luther King Jr Day tribute. Here they are:

Martin Luther King - Technology

"When we look at modern man we have to face the fact that modern man suffers from a kind of a kind of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to his scientific and technological abundance we learned to fly the air like birds, we've earned to swim the sea like fish yet we haven't learned to walk the earth as brothers and sisters."