Tag: Legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King

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How To Survive A Plague, Pt.2: Notes for the next four years

January 19, 2025

     Tomorrow, January 20, 2025, the observance of the holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. will coincide with the second inauguration of Donald Trump.  The cognitive dissonance of celebrating a man who pushed this country to recognize the civil rights of Black people on the same day as a white supremacist administration is installed to control the Executive Branch is head spinning, to say the least.

     Every person that Trump has nominated for a cabinet post is profoundly unfit for their proposed position.  The defining characteristic that unites them all is sociopathic cruelty and a history of abusing women or animals (or in the case of RFK, Jr., both).

     None of them are distinguished in any field of endeavor, unless you include Elon Musk’s talent for making obscene amounts of money by acquiring companies from innovative founders.  The incoming administration plans to produce the modern equivalent of throwing Christian’s to the lions, terrorizing non-white immigrants and trans kids to distract people from their main goal—looting the Treasury  to enrich the already wealthy.

     The elevation of rapists and abusers to power is meant to signal to American women, whose increasing economic independence is seen as a threat, that any attempt by us to be more than incubators or sentient sex toys for men will be met with violence.  The threat of violence lies in the background of all of Trump’s policies, which can be summed up as “money for my friends, punishment for my enemies.”

       Although the majority of American people didn’t ask for this, Trump’s popular vote victory will add a veneer of legitimacy to these heinous policies.  This is part of the reason that mainstream media companies, tech giants and corporations have been so quick to bend the knee. That and the tax cuts, of course.

     The eager acceptance and normalization of people who are cruel, stupid, and corrupt is dispiriting.  Many of us will be tempted to simply turn away and focus on our little lives.  Some of us with the means to do so will run away— leaving the country in order to preserve our safety and sanity.  Still others of us will accommodate this new reality, in large ways and small, whether by platforming  pseudo intellectual racist, Curtis Yarvin, like The New York Times, or performing at a Trump inaugural ball, like Snoop and Nelly.

    It will be more important than ever, and harder than ever, to hold on to truth and one’s moral compass.  We are heading into uncharted waters, so all I can offer are these thoughts about how to keep one’s soul intact, and fight back against what is coming in the next four years:

  1.  Resist the urge to make yourself feel safer by demonizing someone different than you.  That means don’t scapegoat immigrants if you are a native born citizen.  Don’t demonize trans kids if you are straight.
  2. Be skeptical of any political analysis that omits or elides racism.  Racism is this country’s original sin and the reason behind every public policy that doesn’t make sense.  Remember that most white people in this country will happily suffer, if it means Black people will suffer more, (“Black Reconstruction in America,” by W.E.B. DuBois; “The Sum of Us,” by Heather McGhee).
  3. Get a DVD player and a Bluetooth enabled turntable and buy physical media.  Buy classic films and documentaries. Buy physical copies of banned books.  Buy artists you love on vinyl.  We have no assurance that these tech bros  won’t erase “subversive” media from their platforms and we must preserve knowledge and culture at all costs.
  4. Buy local. Buy from Black, LGBT and women owned businesses where you can.  While Costco and Target have done the right thing, most retail giants have not.  Some things cost more than money.
  5.  Lead with love.  Shaming and scolding those who share our belief in a multiracial democracy is not the path back to power.  Meet with people in real life.  Mobilize mutual aid and community education to ensure that more of us survive, and even thrive, despite what’s coming.

     This will be my last blog post on Facebook.  Most of you know that I host a blog on WordPress and this post, along with my archive of the last seven years, will be available there (link in the first comment under this post).  I don’t know how much I will write in the future, because I plan to take my own advice and be out in my community in New York and New Jersey, helping my folks as much as I can. See you there!

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Happy MLK Day?

January 15, 2022

        Today is the 93rd birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., when we will once again endure mainstream America’s mawkish veneration that flattens and distorts what he stood for.  In the American popular imagination, Dr. King is remembered for one eloquent speech in 1963 importuning white America to judge Black people by the “content of [our] character,” and his death at the hands of a racist assassin.

     Americans prefer to forget Dr. King’s scathing condemnation of white moderates “who are more concerned with ‘order’ than justice; who prefer a negative peace, which is the absence of tension to a positive peace, which is the presence of justice,” (Source:  “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” April 16,1963).

     Americans don’t want to engage with Dr. King’s critique of our country’s vast wealth inequality.  His statement 56 years ago that “depressed living standards for Negroes are a structural part of the economy,” could have been written today.  Dr. King’s observation that, “Certain industries are based upon the supply of low-wage, under skilled and immobile non-white labor,” explains today’s opposition to unionization efforts at Amazon and Starbuck’s, (Source:  “MLK’s Forgotten Call for Economic Justice,” originally published 3/14/1966, The Nation).

      We have completely erased Dr. King’s uncompromising condemnation of the Vietnam War and American militarism more broadly detailed in his incisive speech at The Riverside Church in 1967, when he presciently declared that “when machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered,” (Source:  “Beyond Vietnam:  A Time to Break Silence”, delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King at The Riverside Church on April 4, 1967).

     Today, 54 years after Dr. King’s death, we are not only still battling racism, materialism and militarism, but are threatened by a major political party’s dedication to, not only destroying everything that Dr. King fought for in his life, but to burning down our very democracy itself.

     After all, a country where Black, Brown, Asian and Indigenous people have to surmount an increasing number of obstacles to cast a ballot is not a democracy.  A country where states are passing laws allowing state legislatures to overturn the will of the electorate is not a democracy. A country where benighted bigots ban books by and about Black people cannot call itself a democracy.

      In spite of all of this, Congress is still struggling to pass voting rights legislation.  Putative Democrats Manchin and Sinema persist in elevating an arcane procedural rule over the actual Constitutional rights of living, breathing Americans.  They have been unmoved by pleas from civil rights leaders or fiery speeches by Joe Biden.  Manchin and Sinema would rather preen for Beltway pundits than act.  In the battle between white supremacy and multiracial democracy, they appear to have picked a side.  Whether they are “actual racists” is decidedly beside the point.   Manchin and Sinema may surprise us, but all I know is we’d better have a Plan B.

#MLK Day

#Nocelebrationwithoutlegislation