A Word on MLK Day

On a day that is, once again, ushering four years of bitter hatred, antipathy, and vicious attacks on the working class, immigrants, and the self-determination of the world (especially Ukraine, Palestine, Panama, Mexico, Western Sahara and Taiwan), I believe that the fact today is also MLK day is no coincidence. Indeed, when it appears that all our mechanisms for defense have been exhausted–when, yes, we have been exhausted–we can find in MLK's words the opportunity to reliven ourselves, to remember that work for justice is a lifelong process. I share with you all a couple of his quotes that, back when I was far more active in politics, I would remind myself of:

"You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive. Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair."

"We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I have been to the mountaintop"

I write this as a message to myself as much as I do to you all. Our country has been battered by partisan politics, our people have been lost to our leaders' inaction, our world has been devastated by our decisions, our movement for peace has been shattered by yet another four years of unacceptable intolerance, oligarchy, gridlock, and injustice. But Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, facing three-hundred years of cruelty and the imminent threat of death, did not give up on their work at a major setback. They did not give up their work when MLK's house was bombed; they pushed harder. They did not give up when mixed-race intercity buses were set on fire; they pushed harder. And no, they did not give up even when the KKK murdered three civil rights activists, when Malcolm X was assassinated, or when MLK was shot in broad daylight; they pushed harder.

Free societies are rarely taken over by violent overthrow, but rather by the slow erosion of democratic institutions and the complacency of the people. The second that we give up–that we vote for laws that will deport even immigrants who are accused (yes, accused) of crimes, that we allow others to pretend that gender is sex, that we greenlight the depiction of good as evil and evil as good–we have lost our fight. Do not give up, my friends and siblings, and I urge you all to push ever harder, as these four years will be quite a ride.