First of all, should we cancel MLK Day this year in the face of the nightmare that was January 6?
Or should we celebrate it in defiance, clinging to hope?
There is some amount of hope if what I heard yesterday is true: the agents of the Capitol Riot have purposely suspended threatened violence tomorrow. Thus we can dread the rest of today and Tuesday onward but not tomorrow.
There's a grain of hope in the universal respect and reverence for Dr. King that persists if that is true.
Can Dr. King become an emblem of hope in the possibility of the peace that even President Trump has exhorted?
Some colleagues discern elements of values shared between the capitol rioters and progressives: the trope of revolution against perceived sources of evil and the demand to be noticed and heeded.
If there is a seed of collaboration without violence in that trope, I take microscopic encouragement, but a terrain of turbulence will necessarily intervene. Fear prevails to threaten the hope promised by Biden on the 20th and following. An armed, presumable assassin attempted to tour the environs of the inauguration yesterday. Will there be infiltration among the trusted few invited to the inauguration? Will the presence of 25,000 National Guard troops to protect the event be enough? There will be public protests in DC on Wednesday. According to the Washington Post: "exactly two, with fewer than 100 demonstrators at each, tucked away near the National Archives and the Canadian Embassy inside a secure perimeter, along a largely vacant Pennsylvania Avenue. Federal officials reached a compromise. They say the plan allows the city's tradition as the nation's preeminent stage for protest and free speech gatherings to continue." Is there some hope in that?
All over the country people will watch the inauguration on tv with trepidation as well as hope: in the immediate as well as longer-range future.
If Biden is sworn in, a slim thread of hope will prevail and wall-to-wall vigilence must be maintained. Military vigilance. How can there be rigid vigilance everywhere and security against infiltration among liberal activists?
There can't be. There's a more than cold civil war declared.
Even after we're all vaccinated, the myth of cotidian safety is dead.
On MLK Day I pray for peaceful solutions.
