Around Town
‘Handle Your Situation’: Stirring Sermon, ABC House Student Address at MLK Day Service
|
In important ways, race relations in the United States in recent years recall the nation’s civil unrest of the 1950s and ’60s—the years during which Dr. Martin Luther King became most active, a New Canaan High School senior said Monday morning. After wrestling with issues such as police brutality and domestic terrorism, “from the Trayvon Martin case of 2012 to what took place in Ferguson [Mo.], Charleston and Dallas over the last three years, the country has an increasing desire to put such tensions to rest,” Rajon Mitchell, an ABC House of New Canaan student, said during a special service at United Methodist Church. “To sum up the issues of the ‘60s and today in a quote by Dr. Martin Luther King himself: ‘People fail to get along because they fear each other, they fear each other because they don’t know each other, and they don’t know each other because they have not communicated with each other,’ ” Mitchell told more than 200 people gathered at the South Avenue church for an annual “Service of Remembrance” on Martin Luther King Day. “While it is true for both eras, there is one thing that separates this day from the 1960s, and that is the means of communication. In an age where the entire world is your audience when you post something online, we have an opportunity to build bridges between communities, in an era where communities and cultures that may never have known that each other existed 350 years ago now know are able to connect and share in a cultural fusion.