Bending Towards Injustice
Totalitarian regimes achieve power by gradually normalizing extreme ideas and practices that would have once been considered unthinkable.
On March 25, 1965, Martin Luther King led 25,000 civil rights marchers on a historic 54-mile march from Selma, Alabama, to the steps of the state capitol in Montgomery, to demand voting rights for African Americans. It was a right enshrined in the 15th Amendment that was being systematically denied in the Jim Crow South.
King delivered a remarkable speech that day, titled "How Long, Not Long,” affirming his deep belief in the inevitability of equality.
At the height of his address, he used a phrase that he would often repeat during the struggle for equality, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
I was 15 1/2 years old on that day, and like millions of Americans of all ages, I was deeply troubled by current events in my country. Two weeks earlier, the first U.S. combat troops had arrived in Vietnam. Throughout the South, civil rights marchers were being attacked and beaten by police.
Just two years earlier, Medgar Evers, a WWII veteran and civil rights activist, had been assassinated by a white supremacist outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi.
Martin Luther King’s words that day gave all of us some desperately needed comfort and hope. Justice and morality would ultimately prevail. Things would surely get better… sooner rather than later.
Six months after that stirring speech, the Voting Rights Act was passed. It had taken three marches from Selma, the first two having been met with police brutality.
It seemed so prophetic. From slavery through Jim Crow, segregated lunch counters to redlining and job discrimination, the moral arc of the universe truly was bending towards justice… as slow, difficult, and painful as the journey had been, and would surely continue to be.
Three years later, Martin Luther King was assassinated.
By that time, more than 30,000 American soldiers had died in Vietnam, a number that almost doubled before the war ended in 1973.
Robert F. Kennedy would soon be assassinated, and student protesters at Kent State would be gunned down by federal troops.
Our nation was deeply divided and in profound turmoil.
The Moral Arc, It Seems, Bends Both Ways
On Monday, dozens of heavily armed Border Patrol, ICE Agents, and 90 National Guard troops descended on MacArthur Park in Los Angeles in armored vehicles and on horseback.
Often called the “Ellis Island of the West Coast” for its large immigrant population, the park was all but empty.
It was a premeditated stunt designed to display ominous force and sow deep fear throughout the community. They even had right-wing media members “embedded” with the agents, filming it for their broadcasts of propaganda disguised as news.
It was extremism being normalized once again.
After 249 years of democracy, during which we have striven to live up more fully to our foundational ideals, we are seeing the arc of American history bending rapidly towards injustice, with the threat of totalitarianism staring us in the face.
To prevent tyranny, our Constitution was designed to diffuse and divide power among different branches and levels of government, incorporate checks and balances to prevent any one branch from becoming too powerful, and protect fundamental individual rights to safeguard against the rise of a dictatorship.
As I detailed in my last post, “The Twenty-Seven Grievances,” the Trump administration is already committing many of the acts that caused the colonists to rebel from King George III of Great Britain.
These include:
Sending Officers to Harass the People
Using Armies to Control the Population
As Greg Bovino, the Chief Patrol Agent of the U.S. Border Patrol's El Centro Sector, said during the show of force at MacArthur Park:
Resources:
Troops and Federal Agents Briefly Descend on LA’s Macarthur Park in Largely Immigrant Neighborhood ~ Associated Press
Bloody Sunday to Triumphant March: Selma to Montgomery and the Fight for Voting Rights ~ Today in History
Civil Rights Activist Medgar Evers’ Quest For Racial Equality Still Resonates ~ Newsone
Voting Rights Act (1965) ~ National Archives
The Twenty-Seven Grievances ~ Perspectives
Terrible Things are Happening Outside ~ Perspectives
Making Gulags and Concentration Camps Great Again ~ Perspectives
Who Created the Immigration Crisis? ~ Perspectives
They Are Human Beings ~ Perspectives
Standing Up Against the Strongman ~ Perspectives
The new normal, brought (with commercials) by News Corp's Fox News, its affiliates and satellites.
“There are seasons in every country when noise and impudence pass current for worth; and in popular commotions especially, the clamors of interested and factious men are often mistaken for patriotism. ”
― Alexander Hamilton