MLK vs. the idea that some people have the right to dominate others

The United States has several federal holidays that celebrate people or historical events of significance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_holidays_in_the_United_States

One of the most inspiring among these is Martin Luther King Day, established by a bipartisan bill in 1986 to honor slain civil rights activist Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK). MLK was born on January 15, 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia and murdered on April 4, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee. We celebrate MLK day on the third Monday of every January. The main reasons I think MLK day is so inspiring are:

1. Because of Martin Luther King’s amazing leadership of a huge and successful movement to gain civil rights for black Americans and end (legal) racial segregation. King also worked tirelessly against the oppression of the poor by the rich (e.g., he supported organized labor, tenants’ rights, etc.) and he was a global peace activist who opposed the Vietnam War. He wasn’t perfect (nobody is), but in all our history he is unquestioningly among the Americans who have done the most to help other people and improve society, joining a legacy also full of the great abolitionists and suffragists of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

2. Because our embrace of Martin Luther King’s legacy shows that we are capable of recognizing and rejecting the evils of our past and becoming a better, more egalitarian society. MLK was a Baptist minister, and for all my skepticism of religion I am still incredibly moved by the spiritual aspect of his humility and self-sacrifice. At the broader scale, our nation’s struggling transformation from enslavers and oppressors to protectors of freedom for all is our truest enactment of this ideal of spiritual change and betterment.

Of course, our nation’s transformation is incomplete, tenuous, and imperiled. WE MUST NOT FALL BACK INTO THE EVILS THAT KING HELPED US OVERCOME. We are at dire risk of doing just that now because of the fascist regime that has risen to power here.

The regime’s rise owes to the awkward but dangerously successful political marriage of blue-collar white people and the ultra-wealthy elite. This awkward marriage was the “southern strategy” that Nixon’s republicans began in MLK’s time and which lead to Reagan and eventually to the Tea Party and Trump. Trump’s MAGA regime is now the apotheosis of the southern strategy; enthroning a gold-draped billionaire while deploying armies of poor goons to terrorize perceived enemies. The only philosophical tenet uniting the extremely wealthy and the aggrieved poor is the horrible idea that some people have a right to dominate others. This is the polar opposite of the loving, egalitarian society that MLK dreamed of. MLK’s dream is the clear vision we need to fight the fascist corruption taking hold. (And that is why modern propagandists perennially seek to co-opt, distort, and denigrate King’s legacy. Watch out for them.)

3. There’s a third one and it’s a tough one for me. It’s King’s courageous practice of non-violent resistance, refusing to meet hate with hate. He said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” To win freedom for oppressed black people in America he had to touch a spark of love and sympathy in the hearts of largely indifferent white people. While his movement eschewed the strength of arms it grew in the power of moral righteousness enough to finally turn the tide of public opinion. Maybe that is not always possible, but it was so, so beautiful and I want that more than anything for America again today.

Discipline over Doom-scrolling?

One marshmallow now or two marshmallows later? Delaying gratification to achieve a greater good for oneself or the world is a fundamental challenge of adulting, if not THE fundamental challenge of adulting. Convincing myself that something hard is worth it, then really FEELING that it's worth it, is not easy. 

With that said, I'm taking a more serious than usual approach to New Year's resolutions this year. My overall goal is to establish a more functional, integrated approach to work, wellness, and righting the wrongs of the world. More handling, less hand wringing, if you will. 

Hopefully posting about this doesn't jinx my attempts, but SO FAR things are going well. My specific resolutions / actions have been:

1. Make better use of at-the-desk time at work to ensure progress on long-term goals like publishing papers. Towards this end I have dusted off the "JamesWorkLog.xlsx" spreadsheet that Rhonda inspired me to make back in 2023. (It's based on the one she uses to track her writing work.) I can't share the whole thing because parts of it are too embarrassing or profane, but below is a screenshot of part of last week, which went well. 

Something that's making this both easier and more important is that my boss reduced my teaching load by one class for this semester only. So this is my chance to get ahead and I don't want to blow it. 

2. A parallel resolution is to avoid getting sucked into unproductive doom-scrolling. I.e., I can get the gist of our planetary plight and ghastly descent into fascism over morning coffee at home and a few hallway and cafeteria conversations at work. I don't need to constantly traumatize myself to the point of losing focus during the day or losing sleep at night. I want to be informed enough to do my part for citizen resistance while maintaining the ecologist / professor work activities that (I believe) are also a force for good in the world. 

The other motivation for doom-scrolling less is to withhold attention and advertising revenue from the big tech "broligarchs" like Mark Zuckerberg who have chosen to financially support the fascist Trump regime. I still have a lot of room for improvement in this area since, for instance, this blog is hosted by Google, and their billionaire CEO Sundar Pichai is one of the creepy oligarchs who donated a million dollars to Trump's inauguration party as an obvious tithe for the king. 

Specific actions that I have taken so far for digital wellness and ethics are: 

a) I uninstalled the FaceBook app from my phone. 

b) I forbade myself from checking news or social media at work, with the exception of I still let myself scroll bluesky on my phone at lunch. This has been hard but I have kept it up so far and it has already helped me, I think. The temptation to doom-scroll hits hardest when my concentration is needed to complete a difficult or anxiety-inducing task, but when I resist the temptation I keep both the time and the mental mojo I need for the task. 

c) I'm trying to do a "FaceBook fast" for a while (from a few days ago until groundhog day) to see how that goes and if it's something I could do more permanently. There are both pros and cons to that. Like, I reach more people when I post something on FaceBook than when I just post it on this blog and bluesky. But the more read it is on FaceBook the more money it makes for evil Meta corp, abettors of fascism.

d) I removed the ad banners from this blog (today). In 15 years they earned me a total of about $200, and (if I did my math right) over the same time period they earned evil Google corp, abettors of fascism on par with Meta, about $94. Now my blog shall burden Google's servers while giving them nothing in return. NOTHING! On a deeper level it seems like it's always the case that the nearly powerless masses must make great collective sacrifices to finally disempower their greedy masters. Taking down my ads is not a great sacrifice, but it's like, a warm-up for exercising that principle. 

e) I decided to make reading my personal emails a thing again, after about a year of basically never checking the account because I was only barely able to keep up with my work email account. To the extent that I eschew FaceBook I will be more dependent on the old-Internet mode of using email to keep up with family, friends, and if anybody ever comments on my blog. <waits patiently>

f) When I am looking at news or bluesky I'm trying prioritize thoughtful newsletters and blog posts and stuff over the general clickbait articles. Like reading blog posts from historian Heather Cox Richardson and economist Robert Reich. 

Something I haven't done YET, but is on my list to do, is extricate myself from super-evil, F-rated by the Better Business Bureau company "Photobucket," which has been extorting me for $6.99/month for years for hosting my old blog images, heavily watermarked. It was a free service when I started using it in conjunction with my blog in the early 2000s, but then they basically destroyed my blog and held my precious memories for ransom with their black-mirror-like policy change in 2017, earning them the F-rating. 

3. The final resolution thing is "wellness," which I've partially addressed with the above-discussion of how I'm trying to avoiding mojo-stealing doom-scrolling. For physical wellness I'm already in an OK place of getting a bit of daily exercise by biking to work, always taking the stairs at work, paddleboarding or windsurfing whenever I can, and jogging when I can't find time for any other type of exercise. The change for 2026 is just to be a little more pragmatic and less uptight about exercising (like, just choose an activity and do it instead stressing so much over what where and when), and to add the gym at work as another "when I can't make time to get on the water" option. 

Which is the right "hot take" regarding our political situation and the way out?

As 2026 begins, many Americans, including me, are reflecting on our deeply troubling political, cultural, economic, and environmental dysfunction. I know this because of all the hot-takes and hand-wringing about it I see and hear on the Internet and in real life. My contribution today will be a hot take on the hot takes; a meta-hot-take, if you will. Here's what I've seen:

Today's hot takes usually fall somewhere on a three-pointed triangle of who is to blame for the Trumpian nightmare. The extreme perspectives forming the points of the triangle are:

1. "It's all the fault of uneducated, middle-America MAGA types, based on their deplorable racism, sexism, religious zealotry, xenophobia, low IQ, etc. They can't be cured or converted so the best solution is to overpower, ignore, or disenfranchise them."

2. "It's all liberal democrats' fault for being elitist snobs obsessed with political correctness and woke ideology. We've forgotten the common working man, especially the uneducated white Christian working man, forcing him to align with Trump as a last, desperate means to preserve his dignity and economic prospects." Sometimes this take ends with the suggestion that democrats drop their support of women, diversity, education, LGBTQIA+, etc. and elevate blue collar white dudes to the center of everything. 

3. "It's all the fault of billionaires and mega-corporations usurping the nation's treasure and warping politics and media to their selfish ends. They cynically fuel right vs. left culture wars to divert attention from their ongoing heist of the world, all while viciously exploiting their employees, consumers, and young sex-trafficking victims."

Not all hot takes go fully into the extreme of one of the points. For example, Chris Hedges' 2016 essay https://www.truthdig.com/articles/we-are-all-deplorables/, which is still relevant, did a lot of self-critical #2 but didn't excuse the bigotry of #1, and suggested a focus on the economic side of #3 as a way to move forward. 

For my part I think there are bits of truth in 1 and 2, but 3 is the truest. Unfortunately, it seems like we're usually duking it out between 1 and 2 while not giving point 3 proper consideration. I.e., we're giving crooked billionaires a pass that they don't deserve, while playing into their hands by fighting each other on the media platforms they control. 

Here are two quick thoughts on how left-leaning people like me can avoid that playing-into-the-billionaires-hands thing. 

1. DO reject racism and other bigotry, but don't be too snobby against people who didn't go to college or whatever, because when it comes down to it we're all basically working-class people who need to cooperate to resist being exploited by the the ultra wealthy. One of billionaires' tricks is to portray working class liberals as the elites, hiding the fact that billionaires are the actual elites. We shouldn't make it any easier for them to portray us that way. 

2.  Make sure our liberal political offerings are actually GOOD for working people, and not corrupted by corporate BS. As an example, it's hard to argue strongly in support of corporate-mangled policies like the Affordable Care Act because they're so compromised by giveaways to wealthy interests. The republican offerings are all corporate giveaways, too, but we need to offer something that's clearly not that.