I’m not gonna lie, I watched Donald Trump’s Black History Month speech with a hint of both trepidation and excitement that he would manage to unwittingly say unapologetically tone deaf and/or racist. Fortunately (for him), he stuck to whatever script he was given. He didn’t meander or go of the rails on a tangent. He did bring up Black Unemployment again, which is a statement that is, at best, context sensitive, but he avoided a lot of his natural urges to campaign (mostly) and avoided basically all hot button topics. In retrospect, it was boring. On a slow news day, it’s always a bummer when Trump doesn’t speak his mind and give us all a little dose of the crazy. That sounds self destructive, but that sounds about right when the whole country seems to be losing it’s mind.
There is something just wholly wrong and distasteful about bad people trying to justify bad policies using the words of heroes. This is a significant week for many Americans. Monday was Martin Luther King Jr. Day. He was a great man whose contributions to the civil rights movement and social discourse and our societal mindset is…well It’s incalculable. His influence was so powerful, and so inspirational, that generations of young people can tell you the preamble to his most famous speech easier than they can tell you the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. So when Mike Pence when on Face the Nation last Sunday, and used Reverend King’s words to advocate for a border wall…well that left a shameful taste in a lot of people’s mouths. Because building walls and dividing people was not his way. It is the driving strategy of our current administration, but it was a stark betrayal of the philosophy of one of the greatest orators of the last 200 years.
Mind the Exit 