The Hurting Part: This 'Wait' That Almost Always Means 'Never'

On Monday we mourned and honored the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., preacher, radical, orator, warrior and leader of America's civil rights movement; on the same dark day, of course, a loathsome churl, antithetical in every way, came to power. In the hope that love and justice will one day prevail - and honoring King's prescient warnings of "a time when silence is betrayal" - we summon his spirit. "We must accept finite disappointment," he said, "but never lose infinite hope."

Painfully, King's anniversary comes as a nation "whipsawed by a madman" moves toward rebuilding the walls of racism, classism, patriarchy and inequity that King and so many righteous Americans fought so hard to tear down. Not since the Gilded Age of the late 19th century, notes Robert Reich, has the country seen such "vast conspicuous displays" of unaccountable wealth and political power flaunted "unapologetically, unashamedly, defiantly" in the name of helping a racist, hate-mongering demagogue recreate state-sanctioned discrimination, inequality and suffering for the vulnerable among us. Trump's crass, clueless bigotry - calling Black Nazi Mark Robinson “Martin Luther King on steroids," claiming "nobody has crowds bigger than me," even "Martin Luther King, when he did his speech" - just highlights the tragedy that is his effectiveness at re-inflaming the hate King spent his life seeking to quell.

Almost exactly 60 years ago, King led thousands of allies on a pivotal, five-day, 54-mile march from Selma to Montgomery to protest Jim Crow laws blocking them from voting. Days before, marchers led by John Lewis had been attacked and beaten by state troopers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge on what became known as Bloody Sunday; Lewis had his skull fractured and later said he was sure he'd die that day. King set out with twice as many marchers, but having reached a compromise with LBJ, stopped at the bridge where police again awaited, led the crowd in prayer, and before marching back to Selma proclaimed, "All the world knows that we are here, we are standing before the forces of power (and) we are not about to turn around...we are on the move now, like an idea whose time has come." Amidst cries of "Yes, sir!" and "Amen!" he told those asking "how long?" that, "No lie can live forever...because you shall reap what you sow."

Those marching from Selma, said Linda Lowery, 74, "wanted America to change for the better." She was 14 when she marched with Lewis across the bridge; chased by a Selma deputy and a state trooper, she ran into a plume of tear gas and was struck from behind before state troopers beat and kicked her so hard she "rose off the ground" and passed out. She woke up on a stretcher being loaded into a hearse, jumped off, and ran. Almost 60 years later, she still remembers the faces of the men beating her; she says they had the same arrogant, impervious look as Derek Chauvin while he knelt on the neck of George Floyd in 2020. "I could not see where anything we had done had made a difference in the hearts of people," she said, other than some "cosmetic" changes. "People gave their lives to make a change. But it has not changed, and that is the hurting part. America has gotten where it is because there is still hate in people’s hearts."

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Trump, of course, is the arbiter of that hate, its awful exemplar, its malignant founding father. Could King, the ever-hopeful believer, have believed there could ever be a Trump, eagerly marshaling a barren, regressive clutch of bigots, fools and con-men to follow him? "Darkness cannot drive out darkness: Only light can do that," he preached. "I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear." He praised "the brave children of Birmingham and Selma for putting the 'unity' in 'community.'" "Anybody can serve," he asserted. "You only need a heart full of grace." "Only" seems the operative word here: For some time now, grace has been exceedingly rare on the right side of our political landscape. In truth, King remained aware of the fragility and capriciousness of the movement's white allies, never so elegantly, courteously, wearily expressed in his famed Letter from Birmingham Jail after he was arrested for peacefully protesting segregation.

Responding to a statement of "concern" by eight white Southern church leaders suggesting the protests were “unwise and untimely," King wrote a long impassioned defense essentially arguing, "The time is always right to do what is right." He allowed himself both snark - "Never before have I written so long a letter (but) what else can one do when he is alone in a narrow jail cell other than write long letters, think long thoughts and pray long prayers?" - and bitter, "disappointed" criticism of white faith leaders "more devoted to 'order' than to justice." The pastors had commended Birmingham police for their restraint; he noted they may not have "if you had seen its dogs sinking their teeth into unarmed, nonviolent Negroes." Having negotiated with the city's business leaders, "Our hopes had been blasted...promises made, promises broken," and they took to direct action to "present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the community."

To the classic charge he and the activists were "outsiders," he said, "I am in Birmingham because injustice is here... Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." As to "unwise," he insisted, "Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed." And "well-timed" protests don't exist: "For years now I have heard the word 'Wait!' It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. We have waited for more than 340 years for our Constitutional and God given rights...This 'Wait' has almost always meant 'Never.'" Years later, his friend and fierce supporter Harry Belafonte told a panel the last thing King said to him before his assassination was that he worried "we are leading the nation on an integration trip that has us integrating into a burning house." "Most politicians I know make promises and then walk into the faces of power and deny us," Belafonte said. "I'm here to look through the ravages of the Democratic party and see if anything is really worth salvaging."

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Today, of course, both he and King would find virtually nothing worth salvaging in a GOP now greedily cojoined by tech oligarchs Elmo, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Cook et al. "Everybody is coming!" Trump crowed as they trudged to kiss the stubby ring. Their lurch rightward was so dramatic an exultant Three-Shirts Bannon called it "an official surrender" akin to the Japanese surrender to Allied forces in 1945. And the money keeps coming. Hours before taking office, Trump raked in $58 billion, at least on paper, after issuing a $TRUMP meme coin, whatever that is, which accounts for almost 90% of his net worth. The move, which means “anyone in the world" can deposit money into his bank account, was blasted by ethics experts as "the single worst conflict of interest in the modern history of the presidency." Still, meme-based cryptocurrencies are so volatile that, hours after $MELANIA's token landed - Be Best - $TRUMP plummeted 50% from $75 to $30. Cry me a (teeny, surreal) river.

When Martin Luther King Jr. died, he had a net worth of less than $6,000. As radically anti-capitalism as anti-war, he often railed against "excessive materialism" and the false god of money as "a power that corrupts and an instrument of exploitation." Weeks before his murder, he was preparing to launch a Poor People’s Campaign to gain economic justice for "The Other America,” those people, often of color, who "find themselves perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity." Citing government help deemed "subsidized" for the rich and "welfare" for the poor, he decried "socialism for the rich and rugged free enterprise capitalism for the poor.” "God never intended for one group of people to live in superfluous inordinate wealth, while others live in abject deadening poverty," he said. "The problems of racial and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of wealth for all God's children."

What would he make of today's madness - the obscene economic excess and inequity, the flagrant racism and fear-mongering, a political rise celebrated by white supremacist Proud Boys and an unhinged oligarch giving a Nazi salute - no, two Nazi salutes - a new emperor's regime so petty, vindictive and void of substance that within hours he took down the new portrait of a general who criticized him and a government website advising women of their reproductive rights. What a falling off was there. Still, a glimmer of light: Literally minutes before he left office, Biden commuted the life sentence of native rights advocate and political prisoner Leonard Peltier, now 80 and in poor health, to serve the rest of his sentence at home.For 50 years, Peltier had proclaimed his innocence and intergenerational advocates had vowed, "Our resistance will never stop." Peltier: "It's finally over. I'm going home." Martin Luther King Jr.: "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." Take care of yourselves and each other. Given the lack of alternatives, onward.

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