True Edutainment: Celebrating The Dream On Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day

I write and speak a lot about edutainment and convergence; however, if you want to see the power of edutainment and how convergence technology can be utilized to magnify this power just view this video. The famous 1963 March on  Washington speech by Martin Luther King at the Lincoln Memorial demonstrates all of the power, symbolism, and majesty that an edutainment event can do to educate, inform, read, and inspire people to act on living their dreams.


Always be careful when you hear someone, regardless of their race, say that Dr. King stood for judging people by the "content of their character." One cannot begin to speak about the content of an individual's character when individuals are still being judged by the color of their skin. For that matter, one cannot talk about the content of one's character when one is judging an individual by their gender, their race, their religion or their ethnicity. One of the things that the mainstream media does not discuss enough is the use of code words that on their face seem innocent, but the group being slighted always correctly diagnosis that you are talking about them. We see this in Israel as Arabs and Jews trade remarks and violence. We see it in Iraq where differing sects of Islam disagree with words and deeds too. We have seen it Ireland where Protestants and Catholics, both Christians, resorted to angry words and violence for years. This is part of what Dr. KIng always emphasized in his rousing and dramatic finish where he encouraged all of God's children to come together in a spirit of unity and love.



Finally, we can look at the current racially charged election where there are prominent African Americans like billionaire BET Founder Robert Johnson and Congressman Charles Rangel making very inflammatory statements as surrogates for the Hillary Clinton Campaign. There is also the controversial words by former President Bill Clinton as he justifiably supports his wife. President Clinton has been so angry that many in his own Democratic Party are seeing him as a divider and conducting himself in an unbecoming fashion for a former President.


Part of the reason that I write this blog is to make sure that we educate through entertainment with technology. I believe that we must hold our elected and appointed officials, as well as our public figures and role models, accountable for engaging in the politics of division. On this special holiday, I think that it is important that we remember that King's first action was one of service in Birmingham to his church, and it was a peaceful. His leadership during the famous bus boycott was all about economics, justice and decency. Once he came out again the war in Vietnam, and supported Muhammad Ali's draft resistance; he became very unpopular with the White House and many of his supporters both black and white. This speech below provides an excellent example of an issue that is just as relevant today in 2008 as it was back in 1968: he spoke out against an unpopular war in Vietnam just as many speak out about an unpopular war in Iraq today.
 

It is for this reason that I posted his last speech because he was supporting bottom-up change, economic justice, and peaceful demonstration for the garbage workers.The one thing that the tools of edutainment and convergence enable us is to see what people, where they say it, the context in which they say it, and often why they say. Tools like You Tube enable us to see speeches like Dr. King's final speech on demand, so that we do not have to rely on the corporate spin and the mainstream media to tell us how to think! Change is rarely something that takes from the top up; change is often forced upon the society from the bottom up out of necessity. This is what Dr. King was all about; he was willing to go to jail for it; he was willing to be criticized about it; he was willing to lose friends for it; and he was willing to die for it. My question is this: is there something that you feel strong enough about that you are willing to do die for it? Dr. King raised this rhetorical question, can you answer it affirmatively?
Now that's edutainment!