Tomorrow is Martin Luther King Jr's birthday so today undoubtedly school children around the country are reciting his "I Have a Dream" speech in his honor. Listening to King's insightful words spoken from the mouths of children is inspiring and heartwarming -- the first six times you hear it. Over the course of my life I've heard children recite the speech at least 20 times and I've had enough. The performance is just too damn precious and it makes me yearn for something a little less emotionally manipulating, like a Terms of Endearment or a 20/20 exposé on animal shelter abuse.

Sure, I'm being a little harsh, and by no way do I intend to denigrate the life of Dr. King. He was a great leader to whom we owe a great deal, and I think it's important for children all over the world to study him and his work for social justice. However, I've had enough of little Johnny and little Shaynesha stuttering their way through a poorly memorized recitation of the speech. It's sweet at first, but eventually, as you find yourself slumping further and further into your uncomfortable school auditorium chair, you realize that they're sucking the life out of the thing. It's like the kids become these little robots mechanically delivering the lines as if they were reading them off an eye chart. This is especially the case with the younger ones who are too little to comprehend the profundity of the words they're spitting out.

Clearly these performances are primarily for the teachers and parents who organized them. They produce their tribute to MLK and then everybody sees that they aren't racist because they forced the entire first grade to read his famous speech in front of the rest of the school. Bravo. Keep hope alive. We Shall Overcome. Etc. Etc. Time for lunch and recess.

I know there are many schools that have curricula that delve deeper into King's life and times, and I salute them for it. But for every school that studies the Montgomery bus boycott or King's Letter from Birmingham Jail, there's another school sleepwalking through the motions of an obligatory MLK Day all-school assembly. What makes the "I Have a Dream" speech particularly poignant today is that King's dream of children from different backgrounds living and playing together has in some part come true. So why mess it up by making them sit together in a poorly-heated auditorium for an hour listening to little multicultural robots mangle his words to death?

Enough already!

How about instead of keeping Dr. King's dream alive through making kids read his famous speech over and over again, let's keep his dream alive through real-life action. Let's find ways for students to promote social justice -- help them understand how to deliver King's message to their communities through real-world action. Is some person or group being treated unfairly? Let's work together to help them! Is a company mistreating its workers? Let's work together to help them! Is a famous fair-to-middling blogger despondent about the poor traffic his site has had as of late? Let's work together to help him!

DO something. ANYthing. Just give "I Have a Dream" a rest. Let's put it in a box and shelve it for the next decade or so. Otherwise, it'll just get played-out and wind up being as cool and hip as the Pledge of Allegiance.

This post is dedicated to taking Monday off and seeing you on Tuesday.