King's Dream Remains Unrealized in Sleepless Seattle

Last year brought us news stories detailing accounts of an upstanding African American being chased, repeatedly tasered, and detained for simply being black in the wrong neighborhood. Videos of a black man being tasered on the ground after being pepper sprayed and pummeled by cops simply for talking back. Reports indicating that people of color are more likely to be charged with drug related crimes and cases of police brutality occurring more often to minorities than any other group. Reports of racist graffiti and leaflets continue to increase and often go unpunished while violent assaults against homosexuals and their friends go ignored by the police.

No, this isn’t from the intolerant south, not Mississippi nor Louisiana… These stories are from “progressive” Seattle, here in the new millennium, where people still struggle to realize Martin Luther King Jr’s dream of equality for all before the eyes of the law and in the eyes of the people. Yes, King’s dream is still but a daydream here in sleepless Seattle, even though the city insists that it celebrates that dream and that man today. Yet they let go of that dream by letting their police forces continue their brutality while turning a blind eye towards injustices against those for whom the dream was dreamt... which ultimately was all of us.

Here in Seattle, way up in the north, deep in the bluest part of this blue state, in the county with the namesake of that great dreamer; the dream is still sleepless and restless to become reality. Today deserves not celebration, but instead a realization that the dream remains unfulfilled and a recognition that King’s dream is still yearning for more dreamers... people who dream of equal, human, rights for all of humanity.