The Witness Chronicles, January 15, 2024: “The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around…”

~ Martin Luther King, April 3, 1968

Photo by Jimmy Woo on Unsplash

“Now, that’s a strange statement to make, because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around…. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.” *

The full quote from Dr. King, is more than strangely relevant today, 56 years later, in an election year like no other in living memory. I was a thirteen year old white kid back then, what we might call lower middle class, with two working parents, and I was angry.

The nation was angry about a lot of things, polarized over the Vietnam war, race, civil unrest, still familiar things today. One day I skipped school and took a bus downtown to attend an anti-war protest, a sit down blocking the Main Street of my mid-size city.

I might have been the youngest person there and I dearly wished to be college age so I could be seen like the protesters around me. We sat quietly in the middle of the street with police all around and men with cameras and long lenses in the windows above snapping headshots of the crowd.

Muted speeches were made with megaphones and eventually we were ordered to move, but no one did.

That was my first and only exposure to tear gas. And seeing a cop with a custom made 4’ billy club he swung like a baseball bat, beating the hell out of a kid. That’s when I got out of there.

In a weird kind of justice, that kid was a judge’s son and that rogue cop was fired, but only because that kid was a judge’s son.

When I read the King quote in Heather Cox Richardson’s morning newsletter today I was struck by how his words encapsulate our time, a time of division, anger, fear, and existential danger not unlike 1968. 

This is where I go off on the state of the world and how we have learned nothing in those 56 years, even with our then unimaginable technology and ability to communicate globally from almost anywhere. But I am not feeling the anger and despair I felt as that 13 year old.

I believe we are not going to fail our democracy, regardless of the rants of the right who have embraced nihilism and chaos, just because they can. Politicians like the Republican Freedom Caucus in the House of Representatives think they have power to shut down the government, but they are fools.

And every day they look more foolish as their majority shrinks down to a sliver and more reasonable colleagues seem to be waking up and realizing they cannot continue this madness. The question is, will any of them speak what they feel about the would be dictator they have supported, Donald Trump, a man I think privately shakes with fear at his actions catching up to him?

So, I guess I am an optimist. I have to be, we all have to be. It’s the only way we stop this wave of hate and fear driven by an insatiable quest for power, power that will prove meaningless. We have to believe and act with faith in the democracy.

Trump is teetering on the edge of madness, consumed by rage and fear and an ego that only cares for himself. If you believe in him, understand that he does not care about you and will turn on you in a heartbeat if he has anything to gain by it.

Strange as it may sound, I think his narcissism will be his undoing. He can run on the fumes of his ego but the reality is he only offers fear and division, there are no positive ideas or vision. And vision is why we elect Presidents, vision and competence.

Ironically, Trump ran on a vision in 2016 and it miraculously tapped into a vein of fear and anger that got him elected. But there was no vision there, just bombast and big talk but no action. His only lasting action was a massive tax cut for the very wealthy that increased our deficit by a massive seven trillion dollars.

What he did accomplish was entirely negative or designed to enrich himself. Meanwhile, he lost the next election and his inactions at the beginning of the pandemic may have cost hundreds of thousands of American lives.

Joe Biden started his term with rampant inflation, driven by a Covid caused supply chain failure and price gouging by oil companies, who recorded record profits. And he somehow managed to pass bipartisan bills to rebuild infrastructure and create jobs in the process, protect our intellectual property by bringing semiconductor and other tech manufacturing back to our country, and gradually watch inflation shrink.

Given the political mess he inherited, in hindsight these accomplishments seem almost miraculous, especially in the context of the congress today, which cannot seem to agree on anything. We enter 2024 with a political logjam that has been building for the past year with Republican stonewalling in the House.

But logjams build up until something breaks and a flood pours forth. I do not see how that flood is Republican, because they offer us nothing of value, only anger and fake righteousness. They gutted women’s rights, threaten government shutdowns, fail democracy in Ukraine, and do nothing to deal with immigration except blame it on Democrats.

To repeat, they cry about the very real immigration crisis but offer no realistic solutions or funding to deal with it. A political decision to keep a major problem front and center so they can campaign on it. 

While people die. This week a mother and her two children were drowning while crossing the Rio Grande river from Mexico. Border Patrol officers were trying to save them when Texas police intervened and stopped them. Texas Governor Doug Abbot had declared that Texas had that right and those children and their mother died.

Abbot’s declaration was a direct challenge in the sovereignty of the United States, a political gimmick. But those bodies still floated downstream while their rescuers watched, unable to do their jobs.

In the chaos of this new year, that story barely made the news, a terrible statement about the world we would live in under men like Trump and Abbot, men who care nothing for anything but their ambitions. This cannot stand.

Martin Luther King was assassinated not long after he made the speech quoted above, shot down by a bigot filled with hatred. On the Mexico border three people died, drowned by a bigot filled with hatred, sitting in an office hundreds of miles away.

Is this who we are? I have to believe it is not, but that is on all of us.

*from a speech King made as he supported a sanitation workers’ strike for safer working conditions

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Believe me, it makes my day. M