“There are some things within our social order to which I am proud to be maladjusted and to which I call upon you to be maladjusted. I never intend to adjust myself to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to adjust myself to mob rule. I never intend to adjust myself to the tragic effects of physical violence and militarism. I call upon you to be maladjusted to such things, as maladjusted as Amos who in the midst of the injustices of his day cried out in words that echo across the generations, ‘Let justice run down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.’”
–Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., excerpted from “The Power of Nonviolence,” a 1957 address to students.
How ironic this year that the holiday celebrating the life and ministry of Dr. King was also the occasion for the successful kickoff of the 2024 presidential election campaign of the man most responsible for dashing the hopes and aspirations that Dr. King inspired more than half a century ago.
There was nothing good, nothing, no good news or silver lining, coming out of the GOP primary in Iowa Monday. Trump crushed his opposition, reminding us how little time, actually, has transpired since King’s remarks quoted above were spoken in 1957. Remember also, those remarks came just over a decade after the final defeat of Hitler and the Nazi perpetrators of the horrible genocides of the Second World War, and just a decade before Dr. King, himself, was gunned down.
How sorely does America and the world need a Dr. King now! The election in Iowa this week represents for us the fact that the American social order of the 1950s against which Dr. King urged us all to be maladjusted is still with us to a very large degree.
The fascism that Trump embodies is not something being foisted upon our culture from without. No, it grows from within, with all its facets and variations needing only the spark of a charismatic con man to erupt into a mass movement. We are not far removed at all from the horrors of the last century’s two great world wars and the tens if not hundreds of millions of lives that were so horribly lost to them. In the second war, not only were tens of thousands of young men killed by Stalin for deserting during the siege of Stalingrad in 1942, but when Hitler was finally defeated in Europe, and the British released to Stalin tens of thousands of Russian prisoners of war, including Cossacks, who’d joined Hitler to fight Stalin, they were all summarily murdered. That was before the final burst of over 200,000 mostly civilian deaths arose from the dropping of two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
To continue the quote from Dr. King in 1957, he said, “Nonviolent resistance avoids not only the external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. At the center of nonviolence stands the principle of love….To retaliate with hate and bitterness would do nothing but intensify the hate in the world. Along the way of life, someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate. This can be done only by projecting the ethics of love to the center of our lives.”
In this war- and slaughter-sick world, we are called to stand up on the side of justice for all. After the troubling news of this Monday, when we are compelled to realize that enough Americans have bought into the lies and deceptions of Trump to possibly return him to the White House, how can any person with the slightest sympathy or respect for the freedoms and democracy that so many of our fellow citizens gave their lives to defend in this centuries-long bloody struggle not rise and take a stand?
We all must do our part in the battle for the soul of our very existence as a human species on this planet. We’ve too clearly seen the face of evil in our immediate past to ignore its emergence once again in our very midst.
It’s time to arise.