Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice.
Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.
- The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?
1967
OK, it's been a week, a long exhausting week, and there's a fire burning in our wall. A fervent, morally righteous movement is building. In just a week, our new President has kept many of his promises to us ... and we are horrified. He's begun to do all of the nasty, inhumane things that he promised us that he'd do on our behalf - and for which many of us cheered him at the time - and now we are terrified. He's proven to us to be just the same pathological liar in office as he was on the campaign trail and we are mystified.
How did it come to this?
That answer starts with questions: Who are we? And what have we become?
America is the land of the free, right? And almost all of our ancestors came here voluntarily to live a better life, right? We are that shining beacon in the world, cast into the structure of one of our most treasured national symbols, about which our own poet Emma Lazarus wrote when she penned the transcendent sonnet that follows in part, whose words are forever etched in our hearts, right?
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
In just a week, we are no longer that country, that beacon. Who are we? And what have we become?
As his very first act, our new president issued an order for which his Republican cohorts in Congress have been waiting for years, a charge to dismantle the well-subscribed and now-appreciated Affordable Care Act (ACA). It was largely a symbolic act - such an undoing actually has to be by Act of Congress - but it sent a huge message and, in my view, a dual one:
First, in this decliningly so but still largely Christian nation whose supposed Christ-followers were so instrumental to our recent electoral outcome, the message is that officially and as a matter of policy, we repudiate our Savior's example. We as a nation will not be making healthcare more accessible and affordable to ever more of our fellow citizens. That's right, those who pretend to be Christians have declared that throwing 20 million fellow human beings out of a healthcare system that's actually stemmed the seemingly incessant rise in our national medical costs to be a good thing.
That so many who cheered this inhumanity so vociferously proved to be unfathomably ignorant - morally righteous in their condemnation of Obamacare and too stupid to realize that it was the very same thing as the ACA to which they themselves were subscribers and that provided, in many (if not most) cases, the only healthcare coverage to which they had access - simply prompts our two questions even more urgently: Again, who are we? And what have we become?
The second message that this Executive Order sent, followed as it was by a flurry of others that appeared to be related in an increasingly discernible way, is that it was also the beginning of a planful eradication by our current president of his predecessor's legacy. Oh, sure, that could just be about spiteful politics, right? Perhaps ... but, intriguingly, there's no precedent for it in all of American presidential history, so what's really driving it?
One cannot escape the specter of race, no matter how much we pretend: it's not a coincidence that the only time in our history a succeeding president has consistently endeavored to undo his predecessor's legacy is when that predecessor 'just happened to be' African-American. That such an evisceration hurts so many millions of people reveals the depth of our continuing racial antipathy - which we pretended not to appreciate fully during election season - and reinforces the urgency of asking and addressing our two questions: Who are we? And what have we become?
As a final example of an unprecedented phenomenon worthy of our examination, our new president has repeatedly and wantonly lied to us about the largest and smallest of things ... and yet so many of us want to pretend that we haven't enshrined a pathological liar as our putative leader. Crowd size at the Inauguration. Denial of a long, public feud with our nation's intelligence agencies during the campaign (that also featured a hagiographic lionizing of one of our most dangerous adversaries, but I digress...). That there were literally millions of illegal immigrants who voted for his opponent which is why he lost the popular vote but remains our 'minority' president.
Let these sink in for a moment. Even though they're just a few of the many, think on 'em for a minute. We saw the pictures that compared crowd sizes - be they to previous Inaugurations or, say, a much larger protest that occurred the very next day - so we know the truth (as other areas of our government as well as independent sources have confirmed), and yet he lies to us. We witnessed his repeated dissing of our National Intelligence effort, and especially the CIA while he was bromancing 'Putie' during the last part of the campaign and throughout most of his status as president-elect, and yet he appears at the aforementioned agency and denies that anything of the sort ever occurred and that, in fact, he loves them. (Yeah ... wow!?!) Apparently it doesn't matter that we saw it with our own eyes many times: defining reality is now the political prerogative of our president (or, at least, this one).
And, lastly, even though there has never been evidence of any meaningful amount of voter fraud in modern American History, and certainly none in this most recent of national elections, we are told that there were literally millions of illegal immigrants who voted illegally and for his opponent, no less. Hard to know where to start on this one, but let me jump on the bandwagon of demonizing our national press - and, conceptually, the international press as well - for missing what is surely one of the largest and most meaningful stories in our country's history: that millions and millions of illegal voters descended on our polling places last November ... and they missed the story completely. Shameful, just shameful!
Or, more likely, still unfathomably shameful but for a very different reason: that the man that less than half of us who voted actually selected made the whole (f@#king[!?!?!]) thing up out of whole cloth ... and has now signed yet another Executive Order to investigate the fantasy. Apparently, not only are we going to have to pay for the Wall in two ways - via regular spending funded by income tax revenues as well as a proposed tax on imported Mexican goods that - you guessed it! - means that Mexico pays not at all but we pay a second time - anybody unclear on the multiple bankruptcies now?!? - but we are also going to have to pay for an elaborate investigation into something that we all know never occurred just because the new president decrees it. It's been just a week and we've become Fantasy Island.
Seriously, who are we? And what have we become?
I can't presume to speak for us all, but I do believe an increasing number of my fellow Americans realize just how far off track we've gotten in an incredibly brief time and by our very own hand. Accordingly, I feel compelled to appropriate our new president's campaign slogan to "Make America Great Again" and to repurpose it in the following ways:
- Make America kind again, a country that seeks to help all of its citizens to live a better life (if not really pursue the American Dream) rather than demonizing those who find themselves out of power at any given time or, for too many of our fellows, seemingly permanently
- Make American thoughtful again, so that our leaders - returning to being reality-based rather than partisan-deranged - are actually mindful of the long-term interests of the many constituencies they serve and are accordingly carefully responsive.
- Make America communal again, a place where we realize that our success is tied to our neighbors' and where we act on the truths that MLK taught us, including that we are all woven together in a single garment of destiny and that if we don't learn to live together as brothers and sisters we'll certainly perish as fools.
- Make America conversant again, a society in which we don't always agree but within which we can and do participate in a multi-faceted conversation as we listen to others and their perspectives, educate each other and seek to fashion solutions to our problems that benefit the many rather than the few.
- Make America open and embracing again, a country in which we realize that we're all immigrants, which means that we're all different yet have something to contribute, our diversity being our greatest strength, and in which every man, woman and child is our brother or sister rather than The Other.
Everyone individually and societies collectively make mistakes: this is a given. The question is what are we going to do about this now, at this very - and critical, defining - moment? In other words...
Who are we? And what will we become?
I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind. I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea of the "isness" of man's present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal "oughtness" that forever confronts him. I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsam and jetsam in the river of life, unable to influence the unfolding events which surround him. I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.
- The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr,
Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
1964
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