Selma
What would Dr. Martin Luther King do today?
Monday, January 20, 2025. It’s a holiday, in honor of Dr. King’s birthday. There’s something else going on today, so incomprehensible, so vile, that I’m trying my best not to think about it. We decide to watch Selma.
It’s the first time for me. I react strongly to films based on real events that demonstrate injustice and violence. I remember when I saw Missing, the 1982 movie about the military coup d'état in Chile, backed by the CIA and the U.S. government, which overthrew the democratically elected president Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973, and replaced him with the dictatorship of a military junta and General Augusto Pinochet. Documents declassified in 2023 showed that President Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and the U.S. government actively supported the plan to overthrow Allende because he was considered to be a ‘dangerous communist”. Some 30,000 people were arrested and tortured, some were executed, many of them “disappeared” and were never seen again. Among them was Charles Horman, an American journalist who is the subject of Missing.
I lived in Japan in September of 1973, couldn’t read newspapers, and didn’t watch any TV. Which meant that I didn’t know anything about the events the movie was chronicling. Before I arrived in Japan I had spent a few weeks in Laos where it was rumoured that the CIA controlled the opium trade in the Golden Triangle. Although I had no idea whether this was true, it colored my view enough to think it was entirely possible. But to instigate a coup d'état, to install a fascist dictator in a foreign country? And get away with it? After I saw the movie I was so shocked that it took me about a week before I found my equanimity again.
Watching Selma was different, of course, because I was familiar with the huge moment in American history which is the focus of this movie. I’ve read John Lewis’s memoir Walking With the Wind (highly recommended) which has a photograph of him being beaten all bloody, his skull fractured. This happened on March 7, 1965, also known as Bloody Sunday, the civil rights march led by Lewis, the Reverend Hosea Williams, and others, and which was one focus of the film.
Civil rights demonstrations in Selma had started much earlier, in 1963, as part of the Voting Rights movement demanding voter registration for Black citizens. Alabama’s governor George Wallace was firmly committed to segregation and Jim Crow laws, as was the rest of the Southern United States, and Black people were not able to register to vote although it was their legal right. The marches were organized by members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and in his memoir John Lewis explains how essential nonviolence was to their movement. Inspired by Gandhi and part of Dr. King’s teachings, it wasn’t just passive endurance of violence. They not only endured physical attacks but strove to love their assailants: “The nonviolent resister not only refuses to shoot his opponent but he also refuses to hate him” and “The resister should be motivated by love in the sense of the Greek word agape, which means ‘understanding,’ or ‘redeeming good will for all men.’ ”1 This is something almost incomprehensible for me; more about it later.
Several people were murdered and assassinated; countless marchers were beaten, hurt, and incarcerated, but eventually the demonstrators achieved their goal: on August 6, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, prohibiting racial discrimination in voting. It’s considered to be a landmark piece of federal legislation.
Whew, that sounds like a good ending to discrimination, doesn’t it? Yeah, right. A day after the inauguration Trump signed a slew of executive orders that demonstrate his intentions: to create a country dominated by the right-wing white men who supported him, a country based on racism, sexism, and white supremacy. Take the order that revokes Executive Order 11246 signed by President Johnson in September of 1965 which was supposed to stop discriminatory hiring practices in the federal government and in businesses that were awarded federal contracts. Two amendments were added later: the first one from October 1967 added “sex” to the anti-discrimination list, the second from July 2014 changed “sexual orientation” to “sexual orientation, gender identity”. Gone. The diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in the government will be shut down by January 23 because they are "illegal and immoral discrimination programs" and "public waste"2 according to the new executive order. Déjà vu. Nothing ever changes.
Before I continue to look at our current political climate, I want to ask a question: how do you wrap your head around all the evil that people do constantly. Puppy-mill breeders. Concentration camp wardens. School bullies. Those like George Wallace. Those who cut down the Amazon Rainforest to make more money. Trophy hunters. Wife beaters and those who abuse animals. KKK members. Self-absorbed narcissists. You get the picture. If I understand M.L.King and John Lewis correctly, one shouldn’t hate such people; one should oppose evil itself, not the people committing evil acts (I don’t even really understand what this means). “Here we rise to the position of loving the person who does the evil deed while hating the deed that the person does”, King said in one of his sermons. Theoretically I understand this, but in practice it seems impossible.
And yet… I just read a Substack post by Professor
, renowned scholar of Tibetan buddhism who gave some classes at the California Institute for Integral Studies which I attended. He talks about our “heart resources”, a concept I completely believe in, and he continues:“...even our irritants and enemies demand being perceived as teachers, as stimulants of our blissful and efficacious interventions… We can love them and imagine that somewhere beneath whatever hideous exterior and behavior they hold within themselves a loving heart and inexhaustible life force at least eventually to save themselves from whatever hell they have created.”
And about Trump:
“[He is] possibly the most deranged and intending-to-be-destructive leader of our imperfect country that nevertheless strives in all-too-tiny increments to uphold life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We must look more deeply to find his innermost beauty, hidden even to himself, and to congratulate him on being happy and relieved to think of the world as having bestowed upon him the love that his poor, nervous-breakdown-ridden mother was agonized in not being able to provide him as a tiny infant.” Bob Thurman, Enjoying the buddhaverse.
While all of this somehow rings true, I have no idea how one can possibly do this – find some beauty within this ugly, despicable excuse for a human being who seems to delight in dishing out cruelty? Who doesn’t have a decent fiber in his being? And there are so many other evil thugs; I’m thinking of the robber barons/oligarchs, but also of the 1,500 rioters and felons who had been convicted for their participation in the January 6, 2021 attack on the United States Capitol and have been pardoned by Trump – the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and other unsavory characters. Innermost beauty – you must be kidding.
Any attempt to muster up love is hampered also by the sense that nothing ever changes. Voter suppression has become more sophisticated but is just as present as in 1973.
published a guest post by Greg Palast TRUMP LOST. Vote Suppression Won. which documents the purge and disqualification of over 3,500,000 votes, mostly from voters of color, which would have gone to Kamala Harris. Here’s one tactic for the purge of hundreds of thousands of voters from the rolls: it’s called the Poison Postcard. Targeted voters receive postcards in the mail which they have to sign and return, otherwise they’ll be purged. The postcards look like junkmail, so most people just ignore them – and then can’t vote. The targets were mostly voters of color, of course.Palast concludes with Martin Luther King’s words:
“Let us march on ballot boxes, march on ballot boxes until race-baiters disappear from the political arena. I want to say to the people of America and the nations of the world, that we are not about to turn around. We are on the move now.”
It would be nice to see that things slowly change for the better, but I doubt it… Immorality and stupidity don’t ever seem to die out. What do YOU think? Please let me know.
I think it comes from people not loving themselves.
Thanks for writing this, Jessica, for reminding us about love.