Martin Luther King Day Reflection

“Thank god,” I say to myself as I rise out of bed on the normally dreaded Monday morning.

“Just a free day, nothing obligatory,” I thought. Nothing obligatory? How naive I was in thinking that on this honorable holiday, I had no responsibilities. Although I just spent the day hardly cooking in the kitchen with the kitchen staff, something still did hit me as nothing had ever done before. As a younger student, I had always felt those same naïve beliefs as I had felt earlier Monday morning, yet as the day progressed, I finally realized what Martin Luther King Jr. had been trying to teach me, what he had been trying to teach all of us.

Through out my life; I have grown around all types of communities: The Vail Mountain School community, the Vail Valley community, and even my own class’s community. However, I never searched any further into the fact that being a part of a community, means playing a part in the community. As a youth, I always thought it to be unfair that all of my friends from different communities got to go skiing and I had to stay at school, but on Monday, I realized for the first time that I wasn’t just saying that I truly respect Martin Luther King, I was showing. I truly did honor the man I had always been told to honor. I was not necessarily helping mankind’s community, as Martin Luther King had, but I was helping a community.

So even though I did not stop segregation, find a cure for cancer, or help feed food to the homeless, I still acted out one of Martin Luther King’s dreams, a dream of one tightly bonded community. From now on, no matter what my age or ability, I will always show my respect for the man that made me think of the world through all eyes, instead of just my own. The deed I did was quite small, compared to what Martin Luther King did, but the lesson that the powerful man taught me will stay with me for the rest of my life.