On Tuesday, September 16th Christ Church Episcopal School gathered in the Chapel of the Good Shepherd to celebrate Constitution Day with guest speaker Marvin Quattlebaum.
Mr. Quattlebaum is a father of 3 Christ Church students, Elizabeth (class of 2013), Wes (class of 2017) and Martha (class of 2018). He is a highly respected lawyer not only in the community, but also in the country.
He began his speech asking us to name the American Idol judges. After we named them all, he asked us to name a few senators. Most people cannot name a single one but we were able to name a few.
After we named all of the American Idol judges and a few senators, he spoke about a couple of men. One was Muhammad, a man who ran a vegetable stand after his father died. Each day that he went out with his vegetable stand, the government officials were picking on him. They would take his money every day and no longer had enough for his family. As time progressed, the abuse from the officials got worse, to the point where they flipped over his vegetable stand and ruined all of the vegetable he had. The next day, Mohammed Bouazizi bought a container of gas, dumped it on himself, and lit himself on fire. He survived and their have been many violent protests because of this event.
The second man he talked about was Michael Brown. There have been two different views about what happened before his death: he was running away from the police because he had just robbed a store and they shot him, but he did nothing wrong. This is the case that most people are familiar with, but nobody knows exactly what happened. There have been peaceful protests because of his death.
These two cases make us think about the country we live in. We can think about how lucky we are war doesn’t break out in our backyard.