I don't have the bandwidth to go deeply into the complete fucking over of everything Martin Luther King, Jr. lived and died for with today's presidential inauguration of a man who is the opposite of King in every way possible. So rather than go with a whole history lesson about how King would have had hundreds of thousands of us in the streets today to show we won't go gentle into that Trump night, I'm just gonna give you a couple of quotes from King's 1959 sermon, "Unfulfilled Hopes." It's about how people deal with dreams that are shattered (in fact, he would title a later version "Shattered Dreams"), and he makes reference to how, in the Bible, the apostle Paul wanted "to carry the gospel of Jesus Christ to Spain" but never gets to Spain and ends up in a prison in Rome.
In describing how we react to disappointment, King talks about various kinds of people, including this:
"Have you ever seen mean people? Now, sometimes you take a good psychological analysis of that person. You look back, and you discover that that person had a distant Spain in mind that he wanted to go to, and he had a great hope and a great desire and because of the forces of circumstance something happened and he never got to that Spain. And he ended up confined in a little cell of life that had been brought up and built up around him by the very forces of circumstance. And now he lives in his cell, bitter and angry with life, and he has a sort of demonical grudge against life. This is his response. And he seeks to solve his frustration by taking all of this out on other people. And so maybe sometimes he’s mean to his children, or he’s mean to his wife, or she’s mean to her husband, or mean to people round and about because he can’t find life itself. Life is intangible in a sense; it’s invisible. We, we, we don’t see life; we see the manifestations of life. And you can never take life and hit life and beat up on life. And so he discovers that he can’t get life itself to beat on and pay back for what the universe has done to him, so he finds people that are tangible, and he finds things that are tangible, and he takes this bitterness and this hate out on these things. And this is the solution to his problem, he thinks. The bitterness within, and the anger, he becomes angry with the universe. And he fights the universe through people and things. This is one way that people deal with this problem of unfulfilled hopes. They react with bitterness and mercilessness and meanness."
No matter how much he cruises through the world, Trump believes he's owed more and more: more money, more power, more love, more worship. And because he can never be satiated, he's put himself in that "little cell of life." King would fuck Trump's shit up because he understood exactly who someone like Trump is, how vain and small and awful he is.
And since teaching the truth about the history of this country is about to become banned in many places, here's what King, in the same sermon, had to say for anyone who tries to cover for the sadists and racists in the American past:
"I look back over the dark days of slavery. Let nobody fool you about it. We can romanticize all we want to about the beauty of slavery. There are those who would still try to romanticize about the beauty of slavery, and they, they have their minds back to those good old days. Slavery was a tragic thing. All that the Negro had to look forward to was rows of cotton, sizzling sun, the whip of the boss, and the barking of bloodhounds. This is what he faced. It is tragic to be cut off from some things, but there is nothing more tragic than to be cut off from your language, cut off from your family, cut off from your roots. This is what the Negro faced—going over in ships out of Africa, huddled up in ships, not able even to talk to each other, thrown up and brought over to distant countries to work, nothing in their past to hold on to."
His point was that Black people faced horror upon horror and still found the strength to keep going, keep fighting, and keep the faith. It's a lesson I truly hope I can live up to in the next four years.
(15 years ago, I wrote about how King would tell Democrats to sack up. Sadly, it's still relevant.)
