MLK is spinning in his grave

Until she died a few weeks back, a few days short of her 98th birthday, I’d never heard of Recy Taylor.

In 1944, a young wife and mother on her way home for church, Taylor was kidnapped at gunpoint and raped by six white men. This was in Alabama, so you know where this is heading. There was a sham trial. But, guess what?

The incident had been reported to the NAACP in Montgomery, Alabama, and the organization sent one of its leading investigators with respect to violence against black women to look into it. That investigator was one Rosa Parks, who brought national attention to this shameful situation.

Fast forward a bit more than a decade, and there was Rosa Park, back in Montgomery, refusing to move to the back of the bus. And there was Martin Luther King Jr., heading to Montgomery to help organize the boycott of the bus system. And the rest is history.

History is, of course, still happening.

And thus we have Trump - "I am the least racist person that you have ever met” – showing himself at his unscripted best as the racist he has long told us he is by saying that he didn’t want all these immigrants from “shithole” places like Haiti and some African countries. And asking why we couldn’t get more immigrants from places like Norway. This all took place, of course, on the eve of his clumsily reading some clearly scripted words – “I know words, I have the best words”  - acknowledging Martin Luther King Day.

To me, the problem isn’t that Trump thinks that some countries are shitholes. A lot of people want to emigrate precisely because they live in countries that are, at least where they live, holes or hellholes or shitholes.

As my Irish grandmother so famously said, “If Ireland were so great, we all wouldn’t have had to come over here.”

Exactly.

And my German grandfather sure knew he was escaping a shithole when he jumped on the boat with my grandmother and my toddler mother. Unlike a couple of his brothers, Jake Wolf managed to survive the trenches of the Welt Krieg – it didn’t yet have a number, it was just the plain old World War. And he could see nothing good in the future. More trenches on the horizon. Talk about shitholes…

If Trump has said something like, ‘No wonder people are trying to come here. Their countries are shitholes,’ I don’t think the outcry would have been as fierce as its been. It’s the “people coming from these shithole countries”. It’s the “Why do we need more Haitians? Take them out.” It’s the bemoaning the lack of Norwegian immigrants.

Hey, Mr. “President”, the Norwegians already came here. Back in the day when Norway was, I suspect, something of a shithole. And not just because of lutefisk. But now Norway is one of the best places to live in the world. Healthiest, wealthiest, happiest. Other than the weather.

Martin Luther King, whatever you think of him, was a man of courage.

He risked his life, and lost it. As a young man, not even forty.

And then we have the spectacle of those twin profiles in courage, Senators Tom Cotton (cotton, eh? how apt is that?) and David Perdue (chicken name, anyone? how apt is that?) who don’t recall whether words like shithole were used.

I’m no big fan of Lindsey Graham of late, but at least he reportedly called Trump out. And then told his fellow South Carolina Senator, Tim Scott (an African-American, by the way) that the words that were the said were the words that were said.

It’s Martin Luther King Day.

I suspect that Doctor King has been spinning in his grave for a good long time. But I’m guessing the spin cycle just revved up a few notches.