MLK Day 2021

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

For a key post on how to hold social platforms responsible for the choas they are causing, including the Capitol Insurrection, click here.

Our “original sin” of slavery is much like an individual’s congenital defect. It never seems to go away. Slavery as such is gone. We fought our bloodiest war ever to ban it. We passed three constitutional amendments and, about a century later, two civil rights laws. One of those laws was supposed to make it easy for everyone to vote, regardless of origin. But still we had just one polling place in a huge mostly-Black county in Georgia. Even during a pandemic, we had a single ballot drop-off point in Harris County, Texas, with a population of 4.7 million, over two-thirds of whom belong to “minorities.” Slavery was not merely a brutal, grotesquely exploitive economic system. It was a whole mindset. Race and racism are abstract concepts conceived to justify that system, now gone for a century and a half. White people with supposedly lofty ideals, who called themselves “Christians,” justified violating every principle of empathy, equality, and human dignity that Jesus had espoused. Their mindset let Thomas Jefferson own slaves while penning our national credo, “all Men are created equal.” Apparently few noticed the contradiction. Whites invented the infamous “one drop rule” to set slaves apart and to keep the progeny of rapes by whites as property. Today, no one believes that rule has any chromatic, genetic, scientific or moral validity. We are all part of a brilliant rainbow of genetic colors. Having cracked the DNA code, we can see that now. Yet race and racism persist. In the twenty-first century, when men on the Moon are old news and we can edit our own genetic code, a policeman murdered George Floyd by knee. That murder sparked a nationwide epiphany, with massive, mostly peaceful protests from coast to coast, including millions of white people. Two steps forward, one step back. That has been our slow dance around the dumpster fire of race and racism since our nation’s Founding. We have a tougher time putting out the fire because we made slavery more central to our economy at home (as distinguished from colonies), and we abandoned it later, than did any other advanced Western country. Obsessed with wealth for those quickest to grab it, we Americans have been slow moral learners. Where are we today? It’s hard to tell. We just rejected the only demagogue in our national history to come so close to overturning our democracy. We just survived the Capitol Insurrection. We all ken, or should, that racism and so-called “cultural” resentments were the real fuels for the demagogue and his Insurrection. The Confederate flag flaunted in our Capitol was a tiny hint. We just ended four years with no infrastructure bill. We got only a big debt-fueled tax cut for the rich and for business. So who could fail to see that alleviating widespread economic pain was not high on the demagogue’s agenda? Apparently, 75 million people. But our democracy’s guard rails held. Not just our electoral system, but business and social media, too, have turned on the demagogue. Our collective escape from tyranny was close, but the election and the Insurrection’s aftermath were not. The nation’s and the States’ capitals now seem secure. Way back in spring, when the demagogue seemed entrenched and the pandemic was running wild, suppose someone had made a prediction. Suppose a self-appointed “prophet” had declared: “Next year, Joe Biden will be our President. Kamala Harris, the California Senator of Jamaican-(East) Indian descent, will be Vice-President. They will not win narrowly, but by decisive and indisputable margins in both the Electoral College and the popular vote. The Democrats will have control of both the Senate and the House, and Georgia will be trending blue. Not only that: the demagogue will have disgraced himself, by his own acts, before the vast majority of Americans, including many Republicans. As his term chaotically winds down, he will be impeached for a second time, with a real chance of being convicted and barred from ever holding office again. His minions will resign in droves like rats leaving a sinking ship.” If religious, you might have muttered, “From your lips to God’s ears.” If secular, you might have asked, “What have you been smoking?” In either case, you would have dismissed the “prophet” as an idle dreamer. But all this has come to pass, or will in two days. The Democrats lost a few seats in the House, and their control of the Senate is narrow. But Mitch McConnell will no longer preside over a Senate graveyard where good legislation and pandemic relief for tens of millions of desperate workers come to die. Real experts, with relevant education and experience, will soon run and populate our government. Remember the rich, entitled white people in charge? Remember the ones who hadn’t a clue what they were supposed to be doing—besides taxing their own less, cutting regulations that keep us safe, grossly exploiting racism, and hoping no one would notice? Remember über-incompetents like Betsy DeVos and Scott Pruitt? They are gone. The few who are left, including Pompeo, will leave soon. Yes, the pandemic is still among us, killing and maiming. But vaccines are on the way. Tony Fauci will soon be in charge of public messaging and a big influence in planning. Our government will no longer be bent on drowning itself in a bathtub. At every level, it will start to work again, slowly at first, then gathering speed and coming into synchrony like a fine Swiss watch. Competence, knowledge, expertise, leadership and policies based on facts and data will return to DC. Our Cabinet and senior leaders will look like America: a rainbow of colors, all bold and competent. It’s not good to exult while people are still getting sick and dying, in ever-increasing numbers. But it’s OK to feel some quiet confidence that things will get better. Maybe some of the 75 million will come to their senses as things do. While life remains, so does a chance for redemption. I don’t know what you’ll be doing on Wednesday. But around 9 am California time on January 20, as Biden and Harris are sworn in, I’ll be dancing in the streets. I don’t yet know precisely how I’ll listen to dance music and Biden’s inaugural address at the same time. But with all the electronic devices in my life, I’ll manage somehow. And I’m not going to feel guilty, but relieved and happy, to be hoping again after so much hate, fear and misery.

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