From Martin Luther King, Barack Obama to Trump

I watched and listened again to the Martin Luther King "I Have a Dream" speech delivered at the March on Washington on August 28, 1963. The speech in magnificent totality ends by saying:

"... we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual

Free at last! Free at last!

Thank God almighty we are free at last"

tears rolled down my face.  My tears were composed of equal ingredients happy and sad. Tears of happiness because the nation until the present time had worked to achieve some of King's dream.  The 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson SCOTUS decision which said separate can be in fact equal was overturned by the 1954 Brown v. the Board of Education momentous decision that found separate is inherently unequal paving the way for the integration of public schools across the nation.  Further efforts were made to root out the decidedly unfair and unjust consequences of being born black in this country such as the 1967 Loving v. Virginia another SCOTUS decision allowing interracial couples to love whom they choose and marry if they want.  More decisions rained down ensuring one's birth could not dictate where one chooses to live, eat or what section in a movie theater one decides to sit. 

The Alabama bus boycott of 1955 initiated by Rosa Parks who bravely refused to sit in the back of the bus helped erase the noxious rule that black people had to sit in the back of the bus because the front was reserved for whites. Ultimately landmark civil rights law would be enacted in the 1964 Civil Rights Act which outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.  When one examines the advancement of persons of color through the present one is heartened by the immense progress that has been made.  The election of the first black president of the United States, Barack Obama, would become a seminal moment in the struggle for civil rights that was previously thought unthinkable and impossible.  It became not only thinkable but quite possible. 

How on God's earth did this nation achieve all the aforementioned equality and then elect, perhaps, the most malevolent, evil, racist and corrupt president in US history, Donald Trump?  A closeted hateful white supremacist and malignant narcissist calling himself a right wing nationalist became its 45th president ignoring the win of a Democrat by using the archaic electoral college to bypass a popular Democratic victory and place him in office.  While my tears are those of part happiness sadness still composes them as our republic now sits teetering in precarious balance because no law and no court decision in favor of human rights can erase the deep entrenched white racism that has always existed in this land. It is why the Republican Party today and its leadership are nearly all white. 

The journey from slavery to freedom is still long and while the the arc of freedom bends towards justice it can also back up and reverse itself into many years of social injustice yet again.  Donald Trump has given voice to the heretofore voiceless white supremacists, Proud Boys, Ku Klux Kansmen, gun advocates, well armed militias and other right wing extremists ready to sing Dixie while they threaten and advocate the overthrow of this nation. He calls some American Nazis and tiki torch carriers good people as good as those protesting them.  Sorry, Mr. Trump Nazi's are not good people. They are vicious anti Semites, racists and they are killers.

Hitler was a white nationalist.  Right wing Nationalism is mean, it is cruel, it is evil and it stands gun ready to overthrow the government of this country sanctioned by the dog whistle of this nation's historically worst president who says he can shoot someone in Time Square and get away with it.  He is being impeached on this day to see whether he can get away with other nefarious activities through the entire control of a Republican Party which loves money and power over truth and allegiance to the ideals of this balance of power nation.  His henchmen in that party and he need to be electorally crushed because impeachment conviction by a Republican majority Senate seems impossible. 

I want to hear our words to a new spiritual.  Free at last, free at last thank God almighty we are free of the curse of Trump at last!