Plague Journal, MLK Day
It is Martin Luther King Jr. day. I regret that when King was active in the Civil Rights movement in the 1960’s I was indifferent to the events, to the suffering of Blacks across this land. I did not go out of my way to hurt Black individuals, even felt “positive” about several who I knew personally. I 
didn’t think that I belonged to the racist anti-demonstrators, to the law enforcement officers that used dogs and water cannon against Blacks attempting to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965, — Bloody Sunday. I was an Evangelical Christian, and was concerned with saving souls, and not at all with politics of “this world.” Parenthetically, I did know that King was written of as a communist in the press. I felt the allegation was likely true.
A lot has changed since 1965, my sophomore year in high school. As has often been the case historically, King was murdered, a fate reserved for presumptuous Blacks. That hasn’t changed. Evangelicals now are in full-throated support of our failed President. They’ve concluded that heaven is too long to wait for their “reward.” They desire to have it now, by riding the coat tails of a soulless conman to gain hegemony over civil government.
You need not guess that I am no longer counted with the Evangelicals. Life has taught some lessons, and I’ve witnessed the cruel inhumanity of being “passed over” due to the shade of one’s skin for employment, for professional advancement, for small gestures of daily respect. Now, if compelled to label myself, I’d write “liberal humanist” with the Sharpie on the name tag. The years have passed. Now I regard the “I Have A Dream” speech delivered by M. L. King Jr. at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, words of resistance against the systemic racism crippling our nation since its founding. To view the event and the speech, CLICK HERE.
The words spoken before the reflecting pool at the Washington Monument are the antidote for the rioting and sacking of the Capitol building on January 6th. An assault upon the result of an election, with no evidence of fraud, just the echo-chamber of social media, — merits the arrest and arraignment of every individual captured on video within the precincts of Congress. Moreover anyone who incited and advocated the overthrow of the election, the President and members of congress, ought to be charged with sedition and assigned a trial date. (That would include Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, 10 other Senators, and more than a hundred Republican representatives.) This madness has to be stopped.
This is my thinking on our state of the Union. If you are inclined for a fulsome, scholarly overview I recommend the New York Times essay by historian Timothy Snyder, THE AMERICAN ABYSS.
How about a tune, a life-preserver of rhyme and harmony to hold on to? This one was written as the theme song for the 1973 James Bond film, Live and Let Die. Paul and Linda McCartney are the lyricists.
The irony of the theme is true to the transformation of valuation in my own life which has occurred with the passage of years. When much younger, I was likely to overlook, to give the-benefit-of-the-doubt to manifestly dangerous issues and events. “Live and let live.” No longer. Experience has taught me that cancer must be treated to the extent of medical science, or excised, — if the patient is to live. Many things cannot be finessed. Indeed, pleas “of healing” coming from Republicans are a ruse to deflect responsibility for insurrection and for poisonous seditious rhetoric.
