Daniel Rarela designed a series of memes to stop the late civil rights leader from getting whitewashed this year. Rather than comment on Dr. King’s legacy, which is rich and well known to us all, I’d rather post the way an artist of incredible talent celebrated his life with a series of memes designed to illustrate the real Dr. King. Too often, and this happens with famous people all the time (Think George Washington and the Parson Weem’s stories.), get turned into comfortable role models. All the blood, sweat, and tears of their lives are sucked out of the public’s collective memory and replaced by sugar-coated morality tales, if not designed to are guaranteed to put most anyone to sleep.

I remember Dr. King. I remember the terrible battles of the civil rights era. I remember the assassinations of those years. The mythology of the swingin’ sixties tells us that it was all peace, love beads, free love, Woodstock, and LSD. It wasn’t. The sixties were some of the most traumatic years in our history. And, like the mythology of the sixties paints a pleasantly psychedelic picture of those years, so too, does the mythology surrounding the civil rights movement. Rosa Parks has been reduced to a “tired seamstress” and Dr. King’s message of non-violence turned into smarmy passivity. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Follow the link below and prepare to be overwhelmed.

https://mic.com/articles/165598/artist-creates-letters-from-birmingham-jail-memes-to-stop-people-from-whitewashing-mlk#.EskYbmtFj

Today’s news feed brought yet another story about our bigot-in-chief’s ardent supporters. They have apparently lost all sense of decency as they find new and more ornate ways to support his never-ending lying, his crude behavior, the tax scam he implemented, and his other and varied criminal activities. You can read the full story at this link: https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-toxic-loyalty-of-trumps-hardcore-zealots?via=twitter_page

Over the past year and a half all of the articles trying to explain their lunatic and cult-like behavior indicate that at the heart of their support and the stated source of the justification for their anger is the feeling that they are losing something they didn’t even realize they had — their white privilege. By that I mean that sense of themselves as being on a higher plane that minorities, no matter how low their own situation might be. For example, when christian churches dominated American life, it boosted the self-worth of white evangelicals and helped define their place in their world. Poor white evangelically-affiliated christians may have nothing, but they were secure knowing that gay people, people of color, urban intellectuals, etc. knew their place and dared not challenge them for an equal share of the American Dream.

On this day:  January 2, 1965: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee with the help of Martin Luther King Jr. announced the beginning of a new campaign to help register African-American voters in Selma, Alabama. Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark did his best to stop that. Over the next two months, more than 2,000 people were arrested for attempting to register or encouraging others to vote

What they are suddenly noticing is that the world they created through legal oppression, Jim Crow laws, the criminalization of LGBTQ people, and other legal means, is falling apart. They have been angry since the first stirrings of the civil rights movement of the in the 1960s and have only become more and more angry since. As first one then another and another legal structure perpetuating inequality was struck down, the stark truth began to emerge. Equality for all, meant the loss of privilege for them. The response has been claims of reverse discrimination — we don’t want to share, we want it all; and cries and lamentations that suddenly minorities all have “too many rights.” In spite of the obvious gross inequalities easily observable with no more than a glance, they are screaming that they are now the ones who are being oppressed. It’s nuts, but there it is.