MLK

It's MLK Day here in the US--the day on which we celebrate the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King. Thanks to his leadership--and the work and leadership of countless others in the 1960s--the Voting Rights Act was signed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965. It was a moment of great joy, seeming to finally put paid to the Jim Crow laws that had hobbled the rights of African Americans for decades. 

With increased access to the polls, the prospect for a better, more just, more equitable future seemed momentarily bright. Now look where we are. Led on by the delusional fury of the man rejected from the presidency in the 2020 election, representatives of one political party are working assiduously throughout the country to reverse the progress made by Dr. King and those who worked with him. Motivated by the clear understanding that their prospects in a fair and cleanly run election are dim, they are resorting to every conceivable way to win by voter repression, district gerrymandering, control of the election bureaucracy and other forms of outright cheating.

There seems to be no way to stop these people. They have been working cannily for decades to assume control of the political process, from school boards to city and state governments. Democrats, for their part, have believed--naively, it now seems--in small "d" democratic fair play. Now threatened with the disastrous prospect of a Republican takeover of the House and Senate in 2022 and a further consolidation of their increasingly autocratic right-wing control--they are already threatening to take partisan revenge on Democratic opponents, and even impeach President Biden for unspecified crimes--the only way to stop this long downhill slide from MLK's 1960s is to activate unimaginable numbers of oppressed and reasonable Americans and persuade them to defeat every obstacle designed to keep them from the polls. It will be a Herculean task.

Dr. King asserted that the "arc of the moral universe" may be long, but that it "bends towards justice." Unhappily it has been seized in recent years by those who have nothing but contempt for social justice and seek to distort it to their own nefarious ends. May Dr. King prove right in his guarded optimism, and may this country finally reset its course toward the aspirations of its founders. Flawed as we now know them to be, they had a vision that transcended the limits of their personal lives and projected a possibility for humanity that continues to elude us.