As Barack Obama, the United States’ first African-American president, prepares to turn over the White House to Donald Trump, this year’s MLK Day has special significance for all Americans.
During the past eight years, President Obama continued the same imperial policies of the Bush/Cheney regime. Under Mr. Obama, the U.S. is now at war in EIGHT countries, surveillance over all Americans has deepened, the drone program has dramatically expanded, U.S. arms sales to despotic regimes has increased, and whistleblowers have been more harshly persecuted than ever before. Even Mr. Obama’s signature domestic policy achievement – the Affordable Care Act, now threatened by Republican majorities in Congress and Mr. Trump – was written by the insurance and pharmaceuticals industries, after Mr. Obama threw the single payer discussion under the bus shortly after taking office. What would MLK say?
MLK’s intertwined trio – racism, materialism, and militarism – are alive and well in the 21st century U.S. of Empire. During the mid-20th century, the civil rights movement relied on the federal government to ultimately do the right thing to protect civil and voting rights through federal laws for ALL Americans.
But what of the 21st century?
People of color in the United States have been systematically denied their voting rights by new federal laws that have turned over our electoral system to proprietary for-profit corporate interests. People of color are being incarcerated in record numbers. People of color are being systematically targeted by over-exuberant law enforcement policies, officers who are being more and more heavily armed by Pentagon hardware. We could go and on.
One wonders if MLK, if he were alive today, might have advocated for a more decentralized approach to a more compassionate world. Would Martin, in short, have become a secessionist?
“The arc of the moral universe is long,” King famously observed, “but it bends towards justice,” and we would argue, decentralization.
Happy MLK Day 2017.
Free Vermont, and long live the UNtied States.
