Happy Birthday Dr King!

A few months back, in summer, my son, my husband and I went to a trail to go rollerblading. My son stepped off the car and ran a few yards away and stopped by a tree where a homeless black woman was camping out. The woman, who was clearly a crazy person, started screaming and swearing (using extremely offensive and obscene language), at my little boy. A lot of what came out was racial insults, like "Go back to your country, bitch, and pray to your four-headed gods" etc. My son was taken aback! We quickly put on our gear and left the place to hit the trail! Sometimes it is surprising the kind of impact various situations have on young minds. I for one, didn't expect the following conversation months later!

Monday being Dr Martin Luther King's birthday, they had shown the kids a movie about Dr King in his school on Friday. After I picked him up Friday evening, this was the conversation in the car:

Me: "How was your day?"

Him: "Good. We watched a movie about Martin Luther King."

Me: "How was it?"

Him: "Good."

After a few minutes...

Him: " I think the world is magical."

Me: "Why?"

Him: "Well there was this one time when I was walking somewhere with appa, and I dropped a coin, and it went and fell way far, far, far away. It was like magic!"

Me: "Oh, ok!"

Him: "Did Martin Luther King recognize the magic in the world?"

Me: "Umm... Well I don't know about that, but I do know that Martin Luther King recognized that if we have a dream we can make it come true. His dream was that everybody should be treated with respect."

Him: "Martin Luther King's dream didn't come true!"

Me: "Why?"

Him: "The lady I saw... the lady I saw, with the dark skin..."

[And I think he is referring to some lady from the movie he watched. I hadn't correlated it with the incident back in summer, until...]

Him: "You remember the lady who shouted at me?"

Me: "Oh! In summer? You remember that? Did she scare you?"

Him: "Yes"

Me: "Ok, I remember, but why did you say that Martin Luther King's dream didn't come true?"

Him: "Well, that lady... didn't treat me with respect!"

I was baffled. I took a couple of seconds to come up with an explanation for him. And I did come up with one-- I told him sometimes people's minds don't work properly when they have been under difficult situations, and that they lose control of what they are saying/doing, and it is sad when that happens, but for him to correlate people's dreams, respect for humanity, racism at different levels, and life's ironies, was a lot for me to digest in one evening!