For Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday commemoration to be recognized on the same day that Dr. King’s very antithesis is inaugurated into the Presidency is to bring Frankie Beverly’s song Joy and Pain, to mind. We always experience joy at the very thought of Dr. King, his brilliance, his courage, his resilience. We are reminded of his self-description as a “drum major for justice”, and his harsh criticism of church hypocrisy in the Letter From A Birmingham Jail. From his Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance speech, “I have the audacity to believe that people everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture of their minds, dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits.” King once described himself, in a letter to her wife, Coretta, as “a socialist” because he cared about economic justice and distribution issues. In one speech, he thundered “if the world is two-thirds water, why do we pay water bills”?
The current President, in contrast, has surrounded himself with oligarchs and predatory capitalists, industrial titans who already have billions of dollars of government contracts who aspire to get even more. Putting them in leadership is akin to placing the fox as the overseer of the henhouse, then hoping there will be chickens left when you return. The joy of our MLK celebration is dampened, just a bit, by the current state of national politics and by the realized promises of the 47th President.
Forty-seven said he would pardon the January 6 disruptors and terrorists, and he did, even excusing those who assaulted police officers, even though 47 campaigned with police support. The accounts of Harry Dunn and Aquilino Gonell, two Capitol Police officers who were attacked and eventually left their jobs, are harrowing. Both are angered by the Republican members of Congress who have kowtowed to the 47th President to the point that they have forgotten that Capitol Police officers saved their lives. About 140 officers were assaulted, beaten, sprayed. Several died from the stress. This seems to be acceptable to the current Republican administration. Joy and Pain.
It is amusing or pathetic, whichever you prefer, to hear Republicans attempt to redefine reality. There was no insurrection, says the 47th President, just a protest that happened “out of love”. Where is the love for a man like Gonell, who served in Afghanistan, says he loves our country, yet experienced two or more surgeries from the January 6 physical attack. The people who attacked him deserve incarceration, not pardons, but to maintain the fiction that there was no violence on January 6, pardons serve to paper over the lie.
In a frenzy of take-over ecstasy, the 47th President issued about two hundred executive orders, including the pardons, rollbacks of Biden executive actions, increased border restrictions (declaring the US-Mexico border a “national emergency” even though border crossings are down), One of his executive orders attack federal workers, making it easier for them to be fired without cause. Although our Constitution mandates citizenship for anyone born in this country, he is attempting, through executive order, to eliminate that right. He will withdraw our country from the Paris Climate Accord, eve as we experience the devastating effects of climate change. And he will withdraw us from the World Health Organization (WHO), which weakens health stability on the planet. COVID was a global, not a national, phenomenon, and we needed WHO-generated data to deal with the virus. All in all, the executive orders are a naked power grab, an attempt to diminish the role of the Congress. And while organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and others have filed suits against this President, he has so stacked the Supreme Court that they may well find in his favor.
This consolidation of presidential power is dangerous and painful, but there is joy in the energy and spirit of the resisters. Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network moved their planned outdoor rally from McPherson Park to the historic Metropolitan AME Church, where an overflow crowd listened and learned about ways to resist. In more than eighty cities, including Washington, DC, the ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) Coalition held rallies of resistance against this new administration. These actions are a necessary response to those who would widen the wealth gap, not narrow it. As an example, the oligarchs say that tariffs would offset any losses from the extension of the Trump tax cuts. But tax cuts benefit those at the top, while tariffs burden those at the bottom.
There is joy in revolution, but extreme pain at the attacks on democracy, on human rights, and on basic decency. Our answer – litigation, when executive orders break the law; legislation, when new laws are needed and we have enough allies to pass them; and agitation, the culture of protest, or resistance, of truth-telling. In the words of Frederick Douglass, agitate, agitate, agitate. The current president thinks he can circumvent the Constitution. Many Republicans don’t agree. We’ll see.
