Jan. 20 is Martin Luther King Jr. Day here in the United States of America, a day set aside to remind us of the wondrous, courageous contributions Dr. King made over the course of his short life to our nation and its history; a day that allows us to pause in our routines so we can proudly and gratefully commemorate his uniquely transformative life.

As for me, I plan to focus my energy and spirit this coming Jan. 20 on it being MLK Jr. Day.

But Jan. 20, 2025, is also the day that Donald J. Trump will begin his second term as our nation’s president.

Of course, the person who will almost certainly be pulling the presidential strings will be Trump’s big-time benefactor, the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, a native of South Africa who therefore cannot legally be president himself but who successfully donated over a quarter of a billion dollars of his own money to get Trump and Trump-supporting Republican candidates elected in November.

Arguably, Musk now owns a majority share in our federal government and will, under the guise of being “just an adviser,” to a great extent direct our government (as well as our military forces around the world) to do whatever he wants. That sure is a lot of power, purchased with a heck of a lot of money.

As I think about this coming Jan. 20, I cannot help but be struck by the stark and profoundly distressing contrast between Donald Trump and Dr. King, as human beings, yes, but even more important, as leaders with expansive goals for our country and, by extension, the world as a whole.

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On the one hand, we have the vulgar, immoral, bigoted, kleptocratic, bullying cruelty the incoming Trump/Musk regime plans to inflict on the rest of us for their own benefit and the benefit of their wealthiest supporters. To them, the rest of us — including the vast majority of the 77 million Americans who voted for them — are expendable … except in as much as our labor can be harnessed to feed their greed, and our differences can be inflamed to keep us from joining forces against them.

On the other hand, we can recall the local, national, indeed global Beloved Community Dr. King gave his precious life encouraging us to build on the foundation of our flawed democracy and our deeply imperfect past, a community where racism, poverty, militarism, and injustice in all its forms are eradicated and, as a song I love says, “we are all neighbors, and we all have enough.”

Dr. King once wrote, “An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.” If Dr. King was right, then it is clear the selfish, supremely self-centered, incurious, predatory kleptocrat and felon who will return to the White House on Jan. 20 has yet to start living. It bears noting that Dr. King warned us, too, “that everything that Hitler did in Germany was legal.”

What to do in these dark times? Dr. King advised us, “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” Well, goodness knows that even in my mind’s eye I am having a hard time picturing the steep and winding staircase we will need to climb — as a nation, a world, a species — to escape the dark and gloomy hole Jan. 20 will cast us into, so we can see the sun again.

But on the premise that the person “who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it” (as Dr. King observed), I will try and take a single step every day to climb that staircase out of the abyss, bringing as many others with me as I can. I hope that you will too. In doing so, I will remind myself daily of Dr. King’s wise cautions: that “human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable,” that “every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle,” and that “the time is always right to do what is right,” even when doing so is “neither safe, nor politic, nor popular.”

And I will cling to Dr. King’s promises that, “Right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant,” and that “a man can’t ride you unless your back is bent.” May it be so.

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