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The lesson of the civil rights movement isn’t that goodness always wins out. It’s that for goodness to win out, people must be prepared for a very long, hard fight.
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There is no American holiday more unambiguously positive than the one celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. For centuries Black American fought to hold the United States to its values of liberty and equality. We celebrate MLK Jr as the face of a movement that finally achieved, at least on paper, full legal equality. It’s a day on which I always feel proudest to be an American.
The fight for civil rights has never felt more relevant than now, as so many of the important structures of our nation, including equality and liberty, crack under the pressure of a mad tyrant. But on today of all days, remember: Black Americans never gave up. Generation after generation, they maintained their hope in a better future, and never indulged in defeatist thinking. This was so much harder than it looks to us now because we know how it turned out. Black Americans did not, but they kept the faith anyway. Being able to maintain that indomitable spirit even as progress was deferred for 350 years? Fighting for freedom you may never receive, or your kids, or your grandchildren? And yet they carried on the fight.
I mention this because I am hearing more and more wishful thinking about our current situation. Things have gotten so bad so fast that it’s hard to accept this is the new normal. Most Americans have never lived in times of structural inequality or feared their own government. Most people have never lived in a world where wars were common, safety a fleeting luxury. In the post-WWII era, things have just gotten better—civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, increasing democratization, more wealth, easier lives. Obviously some portion of the population has never experienced these things—but as a nation, we have lived in a time of real progress. That seems normal.
People’s minds naturally expect a return to normalcy. At the top of the post, I pinned a sort of fake graph that illustrates a “craziness quotient” as it advances by month. Things started out bad and immediately got worse. And they still are.
Six months ago, tariffs seemed aberrant and insane. Today we have news of new tariffs on allies because the mad king is enraged he didn’t win a Nobel Peace Prize and now petulantly wants Greenland in recompense. There is no way a mind could have conjured that scenario six months ago. It’s bonkers.
Our minds figure it can’t continue. We know normalcy, and it seems logical and natural that we will return there, surely as spring follows winter. Here’s Paul Krugman, one of Trump’s clearest-eyed critics, momentarily illustrating this propensity:
“The reality is that Trump is growing weaker by the day. Americans aren’t falling into line behind his attempted authoritarian takeover. On the contrary, their resistance is stiffening. The Trumpists can’t even cow Minneapolis into submission, let alone the rest of the country.”
“Trump is growing weaker by the day.” It’s where our mind goes. Hey, things could get better!
Things will not get better.
In fact, they can’t get better, under any scenario, for at least a year. It doesn’t matter how unpopular Trump is—he controls all levers of power in the U.S. for another year at minimum. No, this is our near future:
On MLK Day, we need to take away the right lessons. Trump and the GOP have already made the fantasy scenario impossible, and we need to recognize it will get A LOT worse before it gets better. But the lesson of MLK and the freedom riders and the Underground Railroad is that you can persevere and ultimately, you can win. No one said it was going to be easy, and thinking it will be is deadly. It will be a long, very hard fight. And we will eventually win, so long as we’re ready for the worst.
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